Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 15

There’s a chasm between writing about yourself and writing about your personal life. A lot of young writers want to turn their lives into stories, into films, books, because they feel their lives are somehow significant. But really, it’s not their personal lives that matter, but their own, hard-fought-for ideas. Not just anybody’s ideas, but the ideas that they have paid for with their suffering and their sacrifices and their love of their fellow humans.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
I miss him for all the things he forgot to see in himself & if im lucky fate will help us rekindle a flame that never got set alight in the first place.
Nikki Rowe
...I feel pity that she will never fully understand what it is to be loved and forgiven, then loved even more.” Pastel Orphans
Gemma Liviero
But grieving people are selfish. They won’t let you comfort them and they say you don’t understand and they make you feel useless when all your life you’ve been functional to them.
Melina Marchetta
The dragon turned on the children and unicorns, his mouth open. For a brief moment, they could see his eyes change from blue to a deep red, like coals in a fire. It was almost as if another, fiercer dragon looked at them through Zebedia’s eyes.
Bronwen Webb
I’m a cold-hearted bastard. I’m insular, I’m jaded, a workaholic, I’m ruthless and I’m self-serving. I don’t do forever, I rarely even do “I’ll call you tomorrow”. And just because I’m here now it does not mean if you ask me to stay I will.
Ally Blake
Justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them
Gregory David Roberts
Don't be afraid of change. You may lose something good, but you will gain something better.
Josef Camilleri
A month ago, Gavin had given his employer four weeks' notice. "I'll get a job around here," he'd told her. "Something low-stress, part-time, maybe. We're not paying rent, and Dad's left us plenty. You should quit, too." A year earlier this news would have filled her with delicious, full fat, chocolate-coated joy. But now, after a grueling routine of shitty work, shitty- weird home life in a house where the shadow of a dead boy walked more solidly than the grownups, shitty headaches, shitty worry about a husband who couldn't keep his dick out of other women, the golden offer just weirded Laine out. She didn't trust it.
Stephen M. Irwin
Denial can be a most useful, temporary shield. Unfortunately, such flimsy armor will not last a lifetime. It is best to face your past, and do so quickly, before your past returns to face you.”— André Chevalier
Nikki Sex
But I don't believe coincidences are chance events. I think they're the times we happen to see the mysterious pattern connecting everything.
Julie Gittus
No, what Great Aunt Winifred was suffering from was the persecution every happily single woman suffers: the predictable social condemnation of her independence and childlessness. Dorothy reminded herself of what she'd learned during a university course on feminist history (with a strong Marxist slant): spinsters are a threat to patriarchy.
Tobsha Learner
Lie. Lie. Lie. But remember.Move. Move. While others sleep, move.
Anthony O'Neill
I breathe you. I live you. I love you
Jessica Shirvington
As academia became my identity, my fascination with firefighters became buried and, seemingly, died.
S.A. Tawks
So why had he come? He'd said he'd had no choice, but for centuries men had chopped off their own limbs, faked insanity, gone into hiding or to prison rather than to war. Was there some dark flaw in his psyche? Did he have some perverse need to destroy? To kill?
Dominique Wilson
The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all woman. She is of neither sex, for she has herself no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others.
Germaine Greer
All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse’s pudgy face.
Geraldine Brooks
Even if we have ourselves so fully convinced that we are on the right track because we desperately want the specific direction we have chosen to be the correct one, if the universe disagrees with our choices, it will not be shy in telling us so.
Miya Yamanouchi
Life doesn’t owe us anything. We only owe ourselves, to make the most of the life we are living, of the time we have left, and to live in gratitude.
Bronnie Ware
He was tender with her. He wiped her eyelids with his handkerchief, not noticing how soiled it was. It was stained with ink, crumpled, stuck together. Her lids were large and tender and the handkerchief was stiff, not nearly soft enough. He moistened a corner in his mouth. He was painfully aware of the private softness of her skin, of how the eyes trembled beneath their coverings. He dried the tears with an affection, a particularity, that had never been exercised before. It was a demonstration of 'nature.' He was a birth-wet foal rising to his feet.
Peter Carey
I’m not scared any more,’ said Midge. ‘Thank you, Kevin. Sometimes you can be very kind.’‘Yes,’ said Kevin. ‘And if you tell that to any of the other trolls I will pull off your nose and feed it to a bear.
Doug MacLeod
Listen to your fears, they are the doorway to your freedom.
Catherine Louise Birmingham
Each day, at the same time, Jude would return and they would be there, led by Webb, whose life could not have been more different than his. Where Webb's memories of childhood were idyllic and earthy, Jude's reeked of indifference. Webb read fantasy; Jude read realism. Webb believed a tree house was the perfect place for gaining a different perspective on the world; Jude saw it as perfect for surveillance and working out who or what was a threat to them. They argued about sport codes and song lyrics. Jude saw the rain-dirty valley; Webb saw Brigadoon. Yet, despite all this, they connected, and the nights they spent in the tree house discussing their brave new worlds and not so brave emotions made everything else in their lives insignificant. Somehow the world of Webb and Fitz and Tate and Narnie became the focus of Jude's life.
Melina Marchetta
it was so beautiful', he said. 'the Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. you've got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains....we used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvellous place it would be to come to for a holiday. however terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if its beautiful.
Nevil Shute
All men are ‘real men’, whether they wear KingGees or a pink tutu.
Miya Yamanouchi
But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.
Gregory David Roberts
The best lie is the one that has an element of truth, so it’s good to include something real in your fiction.
Renee Conoulty
There is no growth without risk. There is always something to be gained from any experience. It is up to us to interpret our truth of self.
Truth Devour
She was so beautiful tonight he knew he would die of it. He hated that anyone else should see it. He wished it were something he alone could see. And he knew he was alone, that nobody saw it but him. And he knew that everyone could see it. And still no one could but him.
Patrick Holland
Life,’ thought Septimus, ... ‘you could never trust the bastard. What it gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.
M.L Stedman
Speaking of shabby looks, we're going to have to give you a haircut soon....WHAT?These feathers are getting messy.LET ME UNDERSTAND THIS CORRECTLY. YOU WISH TO CUT MY MANE?Thunder tigers grow manes?OF COURSE! HOW ELSE WOULD YOU TELL MALES FROM FEMALES?This is a trick question, right?A MANE IS A SIGN A MALE ARASHITORA HAS REACHED MATURITY.Her laughter rang out in his mind.So it's going to be a few more decades growing, then?HMPH. I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW MOST FEMALES FIND IT FETCHING.
Jay Kristoff
Through being fired I was given the perfect circumstances to finally answer my calling and live my dream, and I remain grateful to this day for that television network firing me. Without them, I would have refused the call to follow my dream, and I would have missed living the most exciting and fulfilling journey of my life.
Rhonda Byrne
When you can find your own axis, you can revolve around it, for when you revolve your life on someone outside of you, you lose your own alignment. Just as the earth revolves around its own axis daily and through this eternal gentle revolving it also revolves around the sun, if you don’t find your own axis and you don’t gently revolve, you cannot be for anyone.Then, once you have centered on your axis and someone else who has also centered on theirs is brought into your world, the two of you can come together and there is a collision of axes and you shift from your center. This is the sensation of ‘falling in love’.
Malti Bhojwani
You are the master of my heart. I am a slave to you're soul. Intertwined in a perfect embrace that I will never release myself from.
Truth Devour
The only thing you have totalcontrol over is who you choose to be.Be the best you can be.
Domonique Bertolucci
Oh wondrous,' murmured Lin Chung. 'Oh, water, mistress of earth, valley spirit, eternal feminine!''Taoism again?' Phryne leaned close to hear what he was whispering.'From the "Tao Te Ching." The old Master should have seen this. All made by water, the female, cold, moon principle.''Yin,' said Phryne. 'This is the womb of the earth.''Indeed.' He took her hand. 'Completely foreign to all male, hot, sun creatures.''Like you?''Like me. Yang can only admire and tremble.''Come along.' She led him into the centre of the huge space. 'We don't want to get lost in the earthmother's insides.
Kerry Greenwood
The past will only catch you, if you ran from it to begin with.
Nikki Rowe
It makes me wonder, Do we spend most of our days trying to remember or forget things? Do we spend most of our time running towards or away from our lives? I don't know.
Markus Zusak
What comes from the heart will go to the heart
Renae Lucas-Hall
Oh, Cameron," Eldon replied in a whisper, moving closer and brushing his lips over Cameron's mouth. "You are literally the very reason my heart beats. Nothing I have lost can compare with the love in you I have found.
Zathyn Priest
What a rebellious act it is to love yourself naturally in a world of fake appearances.
Nikki Rowe
Blessed with the love of a good man, I felt equal to anything - even the prospect of living out my days in the Antipodes.
Jennifer Paynter
Imagine the state of one's mind if they were to recall its details. All those months cocooned and then the onslaught of this ugly world. Lights and noise and strangeness. It's no wonder we scream with terror at our birth.
Melina Marchetta
There is always the fantasy of maternal love, but it does not accommodate a mother's fear of her children.
Stephanie Bishop
The common soldiers did not blame him for his excessive grief. They knew him. They knew his flaws. Indeed, I think they loved him all the more because he was flawed, as they were, and did not hide his passionate, blemished nature.
Geraldine Brooks
There's nothing to took forward to any more if you don't have dreams," he said. "Because dreams are goals and John might have run out of goals. So he died.
Melina Marchetta
The thought of you makes my days brighter and my nights filled with dreams.
Truth Devour
If parents don’t want to hear the truth, children learn not to speak it.
Nikki Sex
There was something about ink curling across a man’s bulging bicep that invoked the dance of horniness.
Cari Silverwood
We make our decisions, and then our decisions turn around and make us.
F.W. Boreham
People save their strong opinions for women. Why don’t they look at men? If I have to read another book or see another movie about a woman being courageous, I’ll throw up. Where are the books and movies about the men who do this stuff? But no, it’s always about the women. They not only have to get through it, they’re supposed to stand up, become a symbol, allow their whole lives to become derailed and defined by it. What if you don’t want to? People bang on about women having the right to make choices—well, they need to realise women have the right to choose in these matters, too.
Kirsty Eagar
All that I am. All that I will be is defined by this moment.
Truth Devour
Why hadn't that been part of his stupid lifelong redemption program: Do what my wife asks immediately so she doesn't feel like a nag.
Liane Moriarty
Can we make promises to each other, as if we were truly married? Can we swear to be true and faithful and love only each other and all those things? Because I'm in such pain, Margherita, I need to have you, I need to know that you're mine. I've been in torment since I first saw you. No, since I first heard you singing from you tower height. Please, mia bella bianca, please let us swear to each other. Love breaks all spells, I know it does. Wear my ring and let me know-"She stopped his words with her mouth, cupping both hands about his face. Then she sat back to show him the ring on her finger. "I swear it all. Is that good enough? Because I really need you to kiss me again.
Kate Forsyth
It's not Life that begans at forty, it's Death- Victoria
Kathy Lette
When finally she finished and stood herself up, he put his arm around her, best-buddy style, and they walked on. There was no request for a kiss. Nothing like that. You can love Rudy for that, if you like.
Markus Zusak
But what if I make a mistake?' Will asked.Gilan threw back his head and laughed. 'A mistake? One mistake? You should be so lucky. You'll make dozens! I made four or five on my first day alone! Of course you'll make mistakes. Just don't make any of them twice. If you do mess things up, don't try to hide it. Don't try to rationalize it. Recognize it and admit it and learn from it. We never stop learning, none of us.
John Flanagan
In general,' Voss replied, 'it is necessary to communicate without knowledge of the language.
Patrick White
You smiled then, and your whole face changed with it. It kind of lit up, like there were sunbeams coming from inside you.
Lucy Christopher