"Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison When the door is so wide open?"

“I have watched the river and the sea for a lifetime. I have seen rivers rob soil from the roots of trees until the giants came foundering down. I have watched shores slip and perish, the channels silt and change; what was beach become a swamp and a headland tumble into the sea. An island has eroded in silent pain since my boyhood, and reefs have become islands. Yet the old people used to say, People pass away, but not the land. It remains forever. Maybe that is so. The land changes. The land continues. The sea changes. The sea remains.”

Source : Keri Hulme (2005). “The Bone People: A Novel”, p.336, LSU Press

“When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it.”

“When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.”

“I pulled myself from his mind, day by day, piece by piece, memory by memory, until there was nothing of Ruby left to weigh him down or keep him bound to my side..”

“The thing I wrote we ought to look to Canada for is the shorter sentences. I mean, the mess we're in here, is because of the drug war and this idea of adding another five years, another 10 years, you know, like it means nothing to the people involved. It certainly does nothing for crime prevention - what problem are we hoping to solve?”

“To be selfless, you would give charity anonymously, walj softly on the earth, and look out for others-even total strangers-before you look out for yourself. For the Arab mind, the self is an obstacle, an impediment, in humanity's quest foe real progress.”

“Hey, we're like soldiers. Would you go to the Roman army and ask them if they thought they were going to win the battle? If I didn't think we could win, I wouldn't be here. I'd stay home and get fat.”

“If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.”

Source : Jesse Jackson, Roger D. Hatch, Frank E. Watkins (1987). “Straight from the heart”, Fortress Pr