Peter Carey Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

My fictional project has always been the invention or discovery of my own country.

Peter Carey
To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.

Peter Carey
I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.

Peter Carey
I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare.

Peter Carey
If you know the country... then you will be a wild colonial boy forever.

Peter Carey
Would you rather have the lords and nobles back? What is Democracy for? Not so we can rob each other. Or cheat.' I said cheat and felt the teeth in it, the cleat, the cut, the eat.

Peter Carey
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.

Peter Carey
His hair was a curling mess and he showed the proper disregard for sartorial elegance which Harry had always seen as a sign of reliability in a person. Neat men always struck him as desperate and ambitious.

Peter Carey
I don't need new boots I got bluchers back down home. Eff the effing bluchers I'll buy you new adjectival effing elastic sided boots.

Peter Carey
You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.

Peter Carey
We're built, as a nation, on the grounds of a concentration camp. It's like saying 'OK, here's Auschwitz. Here's where we'll start our country.'

Peter Carey
Self-knowledge does not necessarily help a novelist. It helps a human being a great deal but novelists are often appalling human beings.

Peter Carey
People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else

Peter Carey
She understood, as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

Peter Carey