Patricia Grace Quotes

In many stories blackness was equated with evil: devils, witches’ clothes, unlucky cats, bad wolves. New Zealand history was told from a Eurocentric point of view, if it was told at all.

Autumn bends the lights of summer and spreads evening skies with reds and golds. These colours are taken up by falling leaves which jiggle at the fingertips of small-handed winds.

I had always loved writing, but I didn't kind of know that a writer was something one could aspire to be and that was partly because I'd never read writing by New Zealand writers.

That’s what I like to do. I just start out and follow the characters.

To me, 'sovereignty ' means having authority over one's own life and culture. It is a right and something that should not have to be fought for. Terms such as 'self-determination' are not high enough, not good enough terms for this

I grew up amid two worlds, having close, continuous and frequent contact with each. These were two different and contrasting spheres that I inhabited, both full of life and vitality: my mother's Pākehā family and my father's Māori whānau. (chapter 2 p18)

I was okay about being Māori. I was okay about being brown, because this had been reinforced positively by my parents and their families. But I always had it in the back of mind, these people don't understand. They don't know. Along with that there was often the assumption that I wasn't clean, I wasn't clever, you know. These were the things that hurt me.

Dear Rimini and Benedict,
You didn't deserve ill-humour and rebuff, and I had no right to send you off with empty hearts when all you were asking was to get to know your 'father'.
'Father' is what you said.
You probably think I'm still a bit loony. It's probably true.
After you'd gone I kept thinking about my war notebooks. Everything I could tell you, more than I could ever tell you about your 'father', is contained in them.

This first part of the story is about two sisters, Ngarua and Maraenohonoho, who quarrelled over a canoe.

She did not agree with our acceptance of a situation, which was not a deep-down acceptance, but only a waiting one. She saw the strength of a bending branch to be not in its resilience, but in its ability to spring back and strike. (Roimata, chapter 23 p152)

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.

there's singing in the mountains, laughter in the trees, dancing in the light of evening fires. There's whispering in hearts and minds and shadows. That's enough for me. (chapter 31 p238)

The stories had changed. It was as [he] had said, the stories had changed. And our lives had changed. We were living under the machines, and under a changing landscape, which can change you, shift the insides of you. (Roimata, ch23 p151)

Though I had always liked books, any books, any written-down words or expressions, the ones I read as a child were always exotic. I never found myself in a book.

The old woman sang of a time gone ahead, and of those already walking ahead of her on the pathways. Her eyes were reddened as though they bled. And her songs, like the pathways, were interweavings of times and places and of all that breathed between earth and sky. And the pathways and the songs went into a time beyond the thumbing down of the eyelids. (The Stories, chapter 28 p180)