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Patricia Grace

71 quotes

“We don't live in a vacuum, we don't just stay in a little antiseptic spot with nothing happening; there is something happening around us and inside us all the time.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“my aim is not to repeat. I always want to look for something new to attempt.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's as though the pushing outward allows understanding to drop down-as though you've given words, ideas, sometimes conventions, a really good shake. Then you look to see what's happened. (Interviewer: How do you push the edges, as you put it? Do you do it through language?) PG Through using language in some different way, through trying different structures, through experimenting and trying to break the rules.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(What would you say is the main motivating factor that keeps you writing?) PG: I keep wanting to explore, that's probably my main motivation. I want to go where the writing leads me and find out how I'm going to be able to put across what I want to say. I'm looking for new things to do all the time, new ways of reaching out.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that with writing, every experience is important; everything that happens around us or near us or inside us, or that is part of ourselves. When people ask me where ideas come from, I say they come from my own background and my own experience. That experience and background includes everything that happens - what people say and do, and how they say and do it. It includes dreams and imaginings, thoughts and hopes, and desires and disappointments.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I never found myself in a book. The children I read about lived in other countries, lands of snow and robins. Sometimes they lived in large houses and had nurses and maids to look after them. They did not belong in extended families, did not speak as I spoke. There were malevolent aunts and terrible stepmothers. It was wrong to be poor. If you were poor you usually did some brave deed that made you rich by the end of the story, when you would marry a princess or a prince. Or you died in the snow while selling matches. Maidens and Jesus were fair. No one was brown or black unless there was something wrong with them or they held a lowly position in society.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Grace, From the Centre: A writer's life (2021), extract in "'I never found myself in a book': Patricia Grace on the importance of Māori literature", The Guardian.
“To get back to writing the 'ordinary lives of ordinary people'. This is what I believed I was doing when I wrote Potiki. Land and language issues are part of everyday life for Māori. On the whole, the novel was well received. It has stood its ground and seen its way into the world. But it rocked the boat at the time. It showed Māori in a positive light, living in a functional community and being preyed upon by evil Pākehā wanting to wrest land from them by lying and cheating. It was regarded as political correctness (of which there was no greater sin) gone haywire. It was a 'minor miracle', a snide reference to miracle plays, angels and devils, where good triumphs over evil. But land protests at the Raglan Golf Course in the 1970s and at Bastion Point in 1977 and 1978 brought the nation's attention to what was happening in the ordinary lives of Māori people all over the country-injustices that had been ongoing for decades, and still continue. (chapter 18 p198)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who is my audience? My answer to that has to be that I am the first audience. I write for me and I must be the sole judge and take full responsibility for what comes about. The second audience, the one unknown to me, is whoever will read. Once I've finished a book or a story, my job is done. Reviews, analyses, critiques, theses are not written for me. They come after the event. What follows the reading, discussion, dissection, opinion is part of the next life of the book, that is, if it is to have an afterlife. I should say, though, that if Maori readers did not relate to my writing, or if they rejected it, I would not do it. (chapter 18 p200)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's only now that I remember the racket that went on. At the time you become immune to the sounds around you because you're so busy concentrating on where you must go, what you must do to stay alive. There's no room in your head for anything else except your survival. But the roar of guns, the screaming, the din catches up with you eventually. Also the sights that you see affect you more at a later stage than they do at the time. I won't forget men in a row. I won't forget men on fire. I won't forget a tin hat rolling, spinning across the embankment with the head of a man inside. Sounds and sights wait inside you, along with the stink of smoke, gunpowder, mud and rot and burning flesh. They invade your waking hours as well as your dreams.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was once a carver who spent a lifetime with wood, seeking out and exposing the figures that were hidden there. These eccentric or brave, dour, whimsical, crafty, beguiling, tormenting, tormented or loving figures developed first in the forests, in the tree wombs, but depended on the master with his karakia and his tools, his mind and his heart, his breath and his strangeness to bring them to other birth. The tree, after a lifetime of fruiting, has, after its first death, a further fruiting at the hands of a master. This does not mean that the man is master of the tree. Nor is he master of what eventually comes from his hands. He is master only of the skills that bring forward what was already waiting in the womb that is a tree - a tree that may have spent further time as a house or classroom, or a bridge or pier. Or further time could have been spent floating on the sea or river, or sucked into a swamp, or stopping a bank, or sprawled on a beach bleaching among the sand, stones and sun. It is as though a child brings about the birth of a parent because that which comes from under the master's hand is older than he is, is already ancient. (beginning of Prologue)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The shore is a place without seed, without nourishment, a scavenged death place. It is the wasteland, too salt for growth, where the sea puts up its dead. Shored seaweed does not take root but dries and piles, its pods splitting in the sun, while bleached land plants crack and turn to bone. Yet because of being a nothing, a neutral place - not land, not sea - there is freedom on the shore, and rest. There is freedom to search the nothing, the weed pile, the old wood, the empty shell, the fish skull, searching for the speck, the beginning - or the end that is the beginning. Hope and desire can rest there, thoughts and feelings can shift with sand grains being sifted by the water and the wind. I put my bag down there one evening and rested, leaving a way for the nothing, the nothing that can become a pin-prick, a stirring. I took warm clothing from my bag and waited through the night for the morning that would become a new beginning. (Roimata, chapter 1 p18)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had other stories too, known stories from before life and death and remembering, from before the time of the woman lonely in the moon. Given stories. But before life and death and remembering' is only what I had always thought. It was a new discovery to find that these stories were, after all, about our own lives, were not distant, that there was no past or future, that all time is a now-time, centred in the being. It was a new realisation that the centred being in this now-time simply reaches out in any direction towards the outer circles, these outer circles being named 'past' and 'future' only for our convenience. The being reaches out to grasp those adornments that become part of the self. So the 'now' is a giving and a receiving between the inner and the outer reaches, but the enormous difficulty is to achieve refinement in reciprocity, because the wheel, the spiral, is balanced so exquisitely. These are the things I came to realise as we told and retold our own-centre stories. (Roimata, chapter 5 p39)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We could not afford books so we made our own. In this way we were able to find ourselves in book It is rare for us to find ourselves in books, but in our own books we were able to find and define our lives. But our main book was the wharenui which is itself a story, a history, a gallery, a study, a design structure and a conga. And we are part of that book along with family past and family yet to come. The land and the sea and the shores are a book too, and we found ourselves there. They were our science and our sustenance. And they are our own universe about which there are stories of great deeds and relationships and mage and imaginings, love and terror, heroes heroines, villas and fools. Enough for a lifetime of selling. (Roimata, ch23 p104)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the time I gave the paper (1987), New Zealand history was still being evaluated from a Eurocentric viewpoint. It generally glorified the European settler experience and by doing so negated the Māori experience and settlement of Aotearoa. A look at some of the vocabulary in use could be taken as a quick example. Take “pioneer” and “settler”. These referred to British pioneers and settlers. The ancestors of the Māori children sitting in our classrooms were referred to in many less complimentary terms. They were savage barbarians, hostile, cunning. Warlike. Yet the British with all their guns and armoury, sweeping in on many indigenous areas of the world, were never referred to as warlike. In those times, the wars between Māori and Pākehā were still being referred to as “Māori Wars”. A British fighting force was an army. A Māori fighting force was a war party (a term still in use). British fighters were soldiers or colonial forces. Māori fighters were rebels and raiders and warriors (again, still in use). A successful battle by the colonial forces was a victory, by a Māori fighting force a massacre.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there are no books which tell us about ourselves, but tell us only about others, that makes you invisible in the world of literature. That is dangerous. If there are books and stories about you but they are ones belonging only to the past, it is as though you do not belong in present society. That is dangerous. If there are books about you but they are negative, demeaning, insensitive and untrue, that is dangerous. Multiply this by what appears on television, in advertising, teacher attitudes, health services, questionnaires, testing and examinations and in many areas of society, maybe we shouldn’t wonder at the low self-esteem, low self-confidence, and therefore the disengagement of many Māori children with education.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“in the early days I didn’t know what real creative writing was. I thought it was just imitating what had been read. I don’t know – trying to write a new Conan Doyle-type mystery, cobblestone streets, or something like that. That was until I came across writing by New Zealand writers, which was very late – after I’d left secondary school. I started to hear the New Zealand voice in literature and to understand that real writing is writing that comes from your self – your dreams, imaginings, emotions, dreads, desires, perceptions – what you know. Part of what you know comes from the research that you do. Those early influences were people like Frank Sargeson and Katherine Mansfield. I started to experience the New Zealand settings, hear the New Zealand voice in what I was reading for the first time, and then when I came across the writing of Amelia Batistich, a New Zealander of Dalmatian origins, I thought well, this is a different New Zealand voice. It started to click with me that I might have my own voice too. The penny dropped rather late for me. As well as Batistich there were all the Maurices [Gee, Shadbolt, Duggan], as well as writers like Dan Davin, Robin Hyde, Ruth Park, Ian Cross, Marilyn Duckworth, Janet Frame. All added to my enlightenment and to the realisation that I would have a voice of my own. I knew also that there were people who I could write about, or characters I could invent, based on people I knew, who hadn’t really been written about before. There were stories about them, but not written ones.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“what was the best part of writing. The main thing for me is characters. I don’t really worry about anything else. I don’t think about the storyline too much actually – just the characters and what might happen to them because of who they are and where they are and who they interact with. The settings, the stories, the themes and the voices and everything else, the inter- relationships – all belong to the characters. So if you keep true to those characters and how they might develop because of who they are and who they have around them and, to a degree, what happens to them, then the story will unfold. I’ve learned to have faith that something will come out.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t have a sense, when I begin a new work, of standing at the beginning of a long road and looking along it to an end. Instead I have a sense of sitting in the middle of something – like sitting in the centre of a set of circles or a spiral – and reaching out to these outer circles, in any direction, and bringing stuff in. That’s what makes it all closer to me, being in the centre and having all I need within reach around me and piecing it together. So there I am, at the core, with my core idea – the few sentences about the Japanese man – thinking about what I need to bring this character to life and to shift him from A to B.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When Potiki first came out there was quite a bit of criticism of it. One of the reasons was because of the use of Māori terms and passages in the book; the other was that some people thought I was trying to stir up racial unrest. The book was described as political. I suppose it was but I didn’t realise it. The land issues and language issues were what Māori people lived with every day and still do. It was just everyday life to us, and the ordinary lives of ordinary people was what I wanted to write about, so I didn’t expect the angry reaction from some quarters. But there was one deliberate political act, and that was not to have a glossary for Maori text or to use italics. A glossary and italics were what were used for foreign languages, and I didn’t want Māori to be treated as a foreign language in its own country.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm not against research of any sort. I fully understand the importance of research. But I'm against theft. I'm against appropriation — where those who are powerful use their power to take from those who have less power, and then rationalise this by saying that what they are doing is for the greater good; or that those less powerful people will benefit. They never do. It's about sovereignty. There is nothing wrong with one group giving to another because they have absolute understanding of all aspects of what is going on and want it equally as much for the same reasons. It needs to be a giving, not a taking. And research needs to be done primarily to benefit those about whom research is being done — who need to have the say, the power, the knowledge, the 'sovereignty' regarding the project.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“my books are a giving — the first act in communication. Once the book is out there I've done my bit. It's gone. Anything that happens to the book after that is out of my hands, and I've consented to that. Whatever way the book is taken up afterwards is all to do with the next stage of the communication. Reading, reviewing, study, dissection, and commentary are all the business and work of other people — they're all part of discussion. It may all be part of promotion and distribution as well. In other words, if the book is well received then that is encouraging to me. I benefit. I put the book out there to be read and discussed — but if I put it out there and it heads for oblivion, so be it.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source