The Bone People quotes
“But all together, they have become the heart and muscles and mind of something perilous and new, something strange and growing and great.
Together, all together, they are the instruments of change.”
“the Maoritanga has got lost in the way I live.”
“Ah hell, urchin, it doesn’t matter, you can’t help who your forbears were”
“She drinks like I do, to keep away the ghosts.”
“energy was tied up in a tapu thing, was needed for it.”
“it was an old symbol of rebirth, and the outward-inward nature of things...the singing curve of the universe.”
“A family can be the bane of one’s existence. A family can also be most of the meaning of one’s existence.”
“secrets that crept and chilled and chuckled in the marrow of her bones”
“The sea always in my ear, a surf of eternal discontent in my blood.
You’re talking bullshit as usual.”
“The light is blinding: he loves the light”
“The Lightning Stuck Tower”
“The lightning came. It blasted my family and it blasted my painting talent.”
“God knows I deserve your hate...but you don’t hate.”
“Pines grow faster. When they grow. The poor old kahikatea takes two or three hundred years to get to its best, and that’s not fast enough for the moneyminded.”
“Estranged from my family, bereft of my art, hollow of soul, I am a rock in the desert. Pointing nowhere, doing nothing, of no benefit to anyone or anything.”
“a deliberate attempt to manufacture New Zealand myth.” Keri Hulme.
“It was believed that it destroyed their spirit.”
“What about korero, Joe? What about our tribe’s famous talk-it-out with all concerned?”
“The blood pours from everywhere.
He can feel it spilling from his mouth, his ears, his eyes, and his nose.”
“A hook to his jaw and a hook to his thumb and a kind of hook in my heart, by God...”
“The hair of their heads is entwined at the top in a series of spirals...She saw us as a whole, as a set.”
“it is the heart of this country. The heart of this land.”
“But we changed. We ceased to nurture the land. We fought among ourselves. We were overcome by those white people in their hordes. We were broken and diminished. We forgot what we could have been, that Aotearoa was the shining land.”
“The canoe...it has power, because of where it came from, and who built it.”
“How do you weigh the value of this country’s soul?”
“Joe thought of the forests burned and cut down; the gouges and scars that dams and roadworks and development schemes had made; the peculiar barren paddocks where alien animals, one kind of crop, graze imported grasses; the erosion, the overfertilisation, the pollution...”
“they were no longer Maori. They were husks, aping the European manners and customs. Maori on the outside, with none of the heart left.”
“Everything changes, even that which supposes itself to be unalterable.”
“I am tied irrevocably to this land.”
“And home is Joe, Joe of the hard hands but sweet love...And home has become Kerewin, Kerewin the distant who is so close.”
“they only make sense together. He knew that in the beginning with an elation beyond anything he had ever felt. He has worked at keeping them together what ever the cost...But we have to be together. If we are not, we are nothing. We are broken. We are nothing.”
“We’re chance we three, we’re the beginning free.”
“She diminishes to bones, and the bones sink into the earth.”
“So the round shell house holds them all in its spiralling embrace.”
“the land is clothed in beauty and the people sing.”
“Ah they’ll be selling the very air we breathe next,” snarls Kerewin. “First gold, then coal, then all the bush they could axe, and all the fish they could can. And now the very beach....”
The Bone People extra quotes
The text explores the nature of identity within a society where traditional values have eroded. The use of Maori as an integral part of the text, both reinforces the erosion of the traditional culture, and points a way to the future. Consider similar themes of alienation, integration and dispossession in the Australian context, while making connections with the universal.
“a quotidian microcosm emerges.” Carmel Gaffney, Southerly 1986.
“The tensions in The Bone People inspire diametrically opposed readings.”
“the commensal vision depends upon accepting Maori spirituality in The Bone People.” Susan Ash.
“The Bone People is part of a postcolonial discursive formation evolving worldwide to counter not only the “truths” that drive the imperialism of nineteenth-century but also those that drive the centers of power in the twentieth century.” Margery Fee.
“The Bone People gives a deep insight into human nature and breaks new literary ground.” 1985 Booker McConnel Prize jury.
“their bonds exist outside biology...the imaginative strength of the work – that it creates a sexual union where no sex occurs, creates parental love where there are no physical parents, creates the stress and fusion of a family where there is no actual family.”
“presents extreme violence against a child, yet demands sympathy and understanding for the man who commits it.” C. K. Stead.
“She casts her magic on three fiercely unique characters, but reminds us that we, like them, are “nothing more than people,” and that, in a sense, we are all cannibals, compelled to consume the gift of love with demands for perfection. But they, and perhaps we too, are capable of change.” Claudia Tate.
“the three form a unit beautiful and terrifying...held taut by love and pain.” Tate
“I became aware, very early in my childhood, of the beauty and the horror of the world.” Hulme.
“does not merely shed light on a small but complex and sometimes misunderstood country, but also, more generally, enlarges our sense of life’s possible dimensions.” Elizabeth Ward.
“Kerewin is as much a lusty skeptic as she is a seeker after Truths. A sentence thatbegins with an incantation will most likely end comically with an oath.” Diane Jacobs.
“The sea always in my ear, a surf of eternal discontent in my blood.
You’re talking bullshit as usual.”
“On its surface the story of a man, woman, and child defying conventional definitions of familyhood to make themselves a home, The Bone People is an affirmation of the larger families we are born into – of Joe’s Maori ancestors, Kerewin’s fiercely longed-for parents and siblings, even the nefarious underworld of Simon’s drug-dealing parents.” Diane Jacobs.
“It fuses Pakeha and Maori mythology and suggests that biculturalism is fundamental to the future of New Zealand...the first literary work to capture the distinctive qualities of post-colonial bicultural New Zealand.”
“She [Hulme] and her novel have become part of New Zealand mythos.” Aorewa Pohutukawa McLeod.
“Instead of trying to interpret these characters as cultural symbols, perhaps they should be conceived as individuals coming to terms with their own identity like anyone else.” Eric Karl Anderson
“It’s violent and beautiful, full of the deepest contradictions that make us human.” Gunnar Madsen. “a faith that transcendence is possible”
“the cultural eclecticism of her writing, its multiple literary, linguistic and religious/mythic sources, and her linguistic experimentation is interpreted as attempts to merge and meld both English and Maori into a new language capable of expressing postcolonial experience.”
“it is the violence, and especially the violence that wells out of love, which is the most compelling element.” Richard Corballis.
Clare Oatoway
“The end of the novel creates a resolution between contradicting forces such as Maori and Pakeha cultures, humans and nature, past and present.”
“Not only is her spiral dwelling in harmony with the landscape, it creates an harmonious community by achieving privacy, apartness, but also part of a whole.”
“In The Bone People, humans are presented not only as one element of as living earth, they are also just one element in time: links in a genetic chain.”
“The interests of the tribe came before any consideration of right and wrong.” Robert MacDonald.
