Australian Novelist 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.

Do you know the story of the scorpion and the frog? You know, the frog agrees to carry the scorpion across the river, because the scorpion promises not to sting him. And then the scorpion stings the frog, half way across the river. The drowning frog asks him why he did it, when they'll both drown, and the scorpion says that he's a scorpion, and it's his nature to sting.

Gregory David Roberts

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.