Les Murray Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

Axe-fall, echo and silence. It will be centuries
before many men are truly at home in this country,
and yet, there have always been some, in each generation,
there have always been some who could live in the presence of silence.

Les Murray
In a place where 'please' is pronounced 'I s'pose you couldn't'
it is rare to meet with any belief in help.

Les Murray
The trouble
with being best man is, you don't get a chance to prove it.

Les Murray
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
And nothing's true that figures in words only.

Les Murray
Sex is a Nazi. The students all knew
this at your school. To it, everyone's subhuman
for parts of their lives. Some are all their lives.
You'll be one of those if these things worry you.

Les Murray
Waiting for the Australian republic is like waiting for the other shoe to drop. We all know it is coming; according to one's convictions, the waiting is therefore either a sour and uncreative delaying operation or a sort of null interregnum in which all energies are frustrated.

Les Murray
Then, strung out and spotty, you wriggle and sigh
and kiss all the fellows and make them all die.

Les Murray
Australians are like most who won't read this poem
or any, since literature turned on them
and bodiless jargons without reverie
scorn their loves as illusion and biology,
compared with bloody History, the opposite of home.

Les Murray
Men must have legends, else they will die of strangeness.

Les Murray
For the truth, we are silent. For the flattering dream, in massed farting reassurance, we spasm and scream.

Les Murray
I was a freak, but happily my freakishness was language, not, say, classifying antique crankshafts.

Les Murray