Australian Author Quotes

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.

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

Richard Flanagan

Love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night; it is one of those things in life that is truly worth knowing.

The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.

Isobelle Carmody

Manila is a city of extremes. The poor are very poor and the rich very rich. A constant reminder to the rich that there is another side to life.

Most true things are kind of corny, don't you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.

Which meant I got left with Quinn yet again. Given the time he was taking to make his decision, I wasn't exactly happy about that. I mean, putting me with him was like flashing chocolate my way then telling me I couldn't have it. It was just plain mean.

There has come a time when we can no longer remain silent but must speak up for our country which is being sold, abused, mined, depleted, drained, overworked, over-loved, its plants and animals becoming endangered and exterminated faster than we can renew them. Our country is silent, so we must speak and act to save it.

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.

Riding upon the back of a waterhorse - what mortal had ever stayed in such a seat for so long? On a horse made of cold currents and liquid convergences, jests and trickery - pressed against a hide like the burnished sea of midnight, thing look different to the rider.

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

I felt something stir within me. It took a moment to recognise it. Anger.

I have been much afflicted again lately by visitors... and they gave me to understand that if they had had the arranging of the garden it would have been finished long ago - whereas I don't believe a garden is ever finished. They have all gone now, thank heaven.

Elizabeth von Arnim

Glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid?an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at thetop, and? It isinvisible, solid, in short a joyous and paradoxical thing, asgood a material as any tobuild a life from.

I always say nothing you can imagine is totally impossible. It might be unlikely, but that's as far as I'll go.

Life might be easier if you give in a little, but it's better if you hold onto something so hard you can't give it up.

Off with the old and on with the new and never a second's thought between.

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.

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.

'The merging of different motif areas in her drawings and the transformation of spacial relationships into flat correspondences gathers towards a distortion of depicted reality and the dissolution of its phenomenal form.' I didn't try to reach the sense of this. I understood the point of it was to transpose the locus of authority from the works to the discussion of the works. The writer had assumed the role of validating authority for the images he discussed. In order to do this he had been required to transform what he saw with his eyes into ideologies that he could 'see' with his intellect.

I wish to cup knowledge in my hand and drink it as one drinks water by the side of the stream.

Bryce Courtenay

It was so like old times that Henry found himself smiling down at Olek and Mance, playing to her, capable of ignoring the rest. It did seem for those seconds that the earth had at last been pacified by music.

Thomas Keneally

One of the strange things about friendship is that time together isn't cancelled out by time apart. One doesn't erase the other or balance it on some invisible scale. You can spend a few hours with someone and they will change your life, or you can spend a lifetime with a person and remain unchanged.

Michael Robotham

I sense a learning: that much dumber people than you end up in charge.

We have to use our freedoms and privileges to see what respite we can give to those less equipped to deal with their challenges.

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