Australian Author Quotes

Patrick White

Colleen McCullough

Thomas Keneally

Richard Flanagan

Henry Lawson

Elizabeth von Arnim

Garth Nix

The most fundamental thing about a person is desire. It defines them. Tell me what a person wants, truly wants, and I'll tell you who they are, and how to persuade them.

My father is a liar and so am I.
But I'm going to stop. I have to stop.
I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight. No lies, no omissions.
That's my promise.
This time I truly mean it.

Justine Larbalestier

And they need not cause you grief. As my Highland grandmother said-and she had the Sight-Tis not the dead ye have to be concerned about! Beware of the Living! And she was a wise woman. The dead are beyond your help or mine, poor things. But the living need us. Thirty souls at the least, Phryne, are still on that island to praise God who might now be angels-or devils.

Kerry Greenwood

Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty.

Age cannot limit him, nor use exhaust his infinite mendacity.

Dreadful birds, dressed in red with breasts of silver buttons, and cocked heads and sharp mouths, looking for guilt like berries on a bush.

The heart holds, like remembered music,
a landscape grown too dark to see.

I did a research assignment on life in the Middle Ages only last year. I found the era fascinating, all that chivalry and court romance. But I never pictured anything as poor as this village. This is the pits. There's no romance here, definitely no chivary. And it stinks—of sweat and smoke and sewage.

Marianne Curley

Oh! mothers aren't fair - I mean it's not fair of nature to weigh us down with them and yet expect us to be our own true selves. The handicap's too great. All those months, when the same blood's running through two sets of veins - there's no getting away from that, ever after. Take yours. As I say, does she need to open her mouth? Not she! She's only got to let it hang at the corners, and you reek, you drip with guilt.

Henry Handel Richardson

I watch people sometimes, wonder how they can walk around with the weight of what they know.

People without curiosity are like houses without books: there's something unsettling about them.

Quaking muscles in the act of birth,
Between her legs a pigmy face appear,
And the first murderer lay upon the earth.

I wonder, now, about interrogation chambers: why do they think bright light brings the truth out of people? They should try the seduction of shadows, where you cannot watch your words hit their target.

It was my business to sort out the wounded as they were brought in from the ambulances and to keep them from dying before they got to the operating rooms: it was my business to sort out the nearly dying from the dying. I was there to sort them out and tell how fast life was ebbing in them. Life was leaking away from all of them; but with some there was no hurry, with others it was a case of minutes.

Were spirits free from mortal mesh
And love not bound in hearts of flesh
No aching breasts would yearn to meet
And find their ecstasy complete.
For who is there that lives and knows
The secret powers by which he grows?

Christopher Brennan

Ah, you see, Rachel, only strivers know about the stealthiness of time. No matter how young they are.

Susan Ruth Johnson

I was just peeling some potatoes for dinner and they all looked like crisp white potatoes until I cut them in half. Every single one had a rotten, gray core. [...] I feel like the whole world is black, rotting, and evil. Even when it looks crisp on the outside, that's a lie, because you can't trust anything - on the inside it's nothing like mold. [...] So, see, nothing good is ever going to happen, and anyone who says it is, is lying to you.

Jaclyn Moriarty

I really find listening to and reading the work of lyricists and songwriters as essential to my work as reading poetry itself. It is all poetry.

Anyone who ever loves anyone truly loves them because of their indefinable essence, not because they conform to some checklist.

There was some rhythm, some ecstasy in this dance of flight that expressed the fact that happiness which touches depths and rises beyond physical confines is as old as consciousness, yet ever renewed, and is like the glorying flight of the birds

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

Richard Flanagan

What passes relentlessly through the years is blood, and time; all the bitterness or warmth along the way is almost incidental. Even blood gets forgotten eventually, bleached into myth which are bleached of all colour into ashes of myth.

Alone! Alone! No beacon, far or near! No chart, no compass, and no anchor stay!

It's essential that we learn how to defend the Bible and the Christian faith for our sake and our children's. If we don't, the empty and obsolete churches in England will foreshadow the future in America.

Hell is the special pain that dwells in that loss which you yourself have caused