Australian Author Quotes

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

Achilles too staggered a moment. He felt his soul change colour. Blood pooled at his feet, and though he continued to stand upright and triumphant in the sun, his spirit set off on its own downward path and approached the boarders of an unknown region.

Everything in his life had come down to the sensation of her fingers against his. The person he was, the history he carried within himself, every joy and grief he had ever experienced, slipped way like an irrelevant garment. He was nothing but skin, speaking to another skin, and between the skins there was no need to find any words.

I took little interest in fleshly infants; it being my private opinion that their attractions did not justify the fuss that was made about them. I had, for instance, early discovered that, if you gave a baby a finger to hold, it held it. This was perhaps interesting, but it wanted greatly in the dear element of surprise.

Dorothy Cottrell

He was an admirer of the bullfight, and had once drawn my attention to the fact that only cricket and bullfighting had inspired any appreciable literature.

Unconsciously we grow to look upon the sick as people of another world.

A curious thing happened: the terrains of England began to impinge on my consciousness, altering, then effacing, the world outside the library window… I was wrapped in a pleasurable dreaminess. I was in a better place. If true life existed elsewhere, then I had almost found it.

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

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

To make that long, last donkey-ride between the pikeman and the stake, to hear the shouting and the chant of hypocrites, to be a spectacle for animals in human masks!

At these times, the things that troubled her seemed far away and unimportant: all that mattered was the hum of the bees and the chirp of birdsong, the way the sun gleamed on the edge of a blue wildflower, the distant bleat and clink of grazing goats.

The circle is the fundamental geometry of open human communication.

Who says Australia offers not a home for every poor Englishman, or any other countryman that finds his way to our shores? And what sort of thanks do we get for it?

The young girl stood beside me. I
Saw not what her young eyes could see:
—A light, she said, not of the sky
Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.

Now that I know that each star has its path, each bird is finally feathered and grown in the unbroken shell, each tree in the seed, each song in the life laid down - is the night sky any less strange; should my glance less follow the flight; should the pen shake less in my hand.

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.

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

Down under we send soldiers and wool abroad but keep poets and wine at home.

John Streeter Manifold

One constant in a world of variables - a man alone in the evening in his patch of vegetables. and all the things he takes down with him there, where the easement runs along the back fence.

As I stood on the lonely backroad, I'm sure I heard birds, kookaburras, laughing...

Loss leaves us empty - but learn not to close your heart and mind in grief. Allow life to replenish you. When sorrow comes it seems impossible - but new joys wait to fill the void.

Wonder is music heard in the heart, is voiceless...

Rosemary Dobson

I sat in my desolation Withdrawn from all around, Feeling my life was a ruin, a failure. I was empty inside with the utter collapse of my being. I did not care anymore for living or dying. I was alone in my distress and desolation. But as I sat sadly on the ground, The sun reached out his hand to me and touched my face. And so my healing began.

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

To call it a crime against Mankind is to miss at least half its significance, it is also the punishment of a crime.

Frederic Manning