Patricia Grace > Quotes

“We have known what it is to have had a gift, and have not ever questioned from where the gift came, only sometimes wondered. The gift has not been taken away because gifts are legacies, that once given cannot be taken away. They may pass from hand to hand, but once held they are always yours. The gift we were given is with us still.”
― Patricia Grace, Potiki

“The old woman sang of a time gone ahead, and of those already walking ahead of her on the pathway. 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.”
― Patricia Grace

“And the quiet of the house is also the quiet of stalks and vines that no longer jangle at any touch of of wind, or bird, or person passing, but which have been laced and bound into new patterns and have been now given new stories to tell. Stories that lace and bind the earthly matters to matters not of earth.”
― Patricia Grace, Potiki

“There was in the meeting-house a wood quiet.
It was the quiet of trees that have been brought in out of the wind, whose new-shown limbs reach out, not to the sky but to the people. This is the quiet, still, otherness of trees found by the carver, the shaper, the maker.”
― Patricia Grace, Potiki

“It was our own that were able to bring us home. It was those who were not strong that could give us strength. The mud that covered our bodies and clothes now clung to them as well, but it was the same mud that pulled at our feet, the mud of our own standing place”
― Patricia Grace, Potiki

“Don’t carry the bruises or pass on bruises.”
― Patricia Grace, Dogside Story

“After tea [Nanny Ripeka] began to tell me the old photographs, which I already knew, fading on every wall. Tell me who they were and what they were to me. Then she told me of the ones before that, who were not on the walls but whom she had known. Then back before that to the ones she had never known or seen. And her voice that had been slow at the beginning and thoughtful began to chant out the ancient names coming from far back, so I could know them. I was beginning to know them because I had heard them many times before. Beginning to know, yet knowing there was more to understand.”
― Patricia Grace, Mutuwhenua : the moon sleeps

“All they could do was entertain themselves watching the devastation, marvelling at the might of Tāwhiri Mātea”
― Patricia Grace, Dogside Story

“Death is a seeding.”
― Patricia Grace, Potiki