Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 31

But we have seen how brightly light shines in the dark, how sweetly music fills the quiet. All these years you have known only shadow and silence, and we have so much to show you. To save you.We are all worth saving.We cannot ever know, not truly.But we have faith.
Amie Kaufman
If prayer fails I am in a greater darkness yet, not knowing whether I have presumed too much or believed too little.
Morris West
We walked back the way we came, and even though it was dark there were no lights burning inside the houses. They were like people without hearts; raspberry tarts without the jam.
Glenda Millard
True, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between authentic anger and bullshit and that’s why the following exercise is designed to help you express your resentments with integrity, and not with demoralizing bullshit
Will Jelbert
Imagine a hundred million people clicking polls and typing in their favorite TV shows and products and political leanings, day after day. It’s the biggest data profile ever. And it’s voluntary. That’s the funny part. People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they’ll spend all day telling you who they are.
Max Barry
Tess, there isn't a drunken, screaming netballer in the world that would have made me not want to ... continue.
C.J. Duggan
A slow but steady transformation of deviance has taken place in American society. It has not been a change in behavior as such, but in how behavior is defined. Deviant behaviors that were once defined as immoral, sinful, or criminal have been given medical meanings. Some say that rehabilitation has replaced punishment, but in many cases medical treatments have become a new form of punishment and social control.
Peter Conrad
Then he holds her and for a moment I hear total silence; that totally silent part of a cry that announces that the most horrible grief is going to follow. And it does, and he's muffling it, but I can hear and I want someone to come over and jab her with a sedative because its pitch pierces my soul.
Melina Marchetta
Imagine if all the car makers in the world were to sit down together to design one extremely simple, embellishment-free, functional car that was made from the most environmentally-sustainable materials, how cheap to buy and humanity-and-Earth-considerate that vehicle would be. And imagine all the money that would be saved by not having different car makers duplicating their efforts, competing and trying to out-sell each other, and overall how much time that would liberate for all those people involved in the car industry to help those less fortunate and suffering in the world. Likewise, imagine when each house is no longer designed to make an individualised, ego-reinforcing, status-symbol statement for its owners and all houses are constructed in a functionally satisfactory, simple way, how much energy, labour, time and expense will be freed up to care for the wellbeing of the less fortunate and the planet.
Jeremy Griffith
When everyone is poor you don't know you're poor. My father worked so some of the boys thought I was actually rich.
Stan Grant
If Froi understood anything, it was that in this world one's worth came from others.
Melina Marchetta
An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife.
Nikki Gemmell
Such a little difference in Susie's ways and ideas would make them all so happy; such a little change in Peter's habits would make his wife's life radiant. But they all lived blindly, on, each day a day of emptiness, each of those precious days, so crowded with opportunities, and possibilities, and unheeded blessings, and presently life would be behind them, and their chances gone for ever.
Elizabeth von Arnim
If we're not growing we must feel guilty because we are not fulfilling Christ's demand.
Eva Burrows
For you, I do morning price.
S.A. Tawks
Summer came.For the book thief, everything was going nicely.For me, the sky was the color of Jews.When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. When their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some cases were nailed into it by the sheer force of desperation, their spirits came toward me, into my arms, and we climbed out of those shower facilities, onto the roof and up, into eternity's certain breadth. They just kept feeding me. Minute after minute. Shower after shower.
Markus Zusak
I don't care to be someone's first love, I care to be their second or third; after every heartbreak they had experienced, I was worthy enough for them to move forward and this to me is greater than any first's of someone's heart.
Nikki Rowe
It was disconcerting that being in love felt lonelier than lonelines.
Emily Maguire
How could death not be appealing, when the only thing that gave him comfort in life was being unconscious?
Krystal Sutherland
***A KEY WORD*** Imagined
Markus Zusak
My dear woman, our greatest problem is that almost everything is a goddamned code. We do not know what is real any more. Every gesture is symbolic. A man cannot shit short of some pundit finding hidden meaning in it. Even having children is a metaphor. Hence, we cannot trust ourselves; and, therefore, we do not trust anybody. No my dear, I do not believe in codes, and even if I did I certainly would not use one in my sleep! (from the play, Sixteen Words For Water)
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
People's most common regret was living the life others expected of them, rather than having the courage to live a life true to themselves, and realising some dreams had gone unfulfilled as a result.
Bianca Nogrady
You cannot wear every expectation. Consider putting aside ones that don't fit.
Bozena Zawisz
She would go off in the morning with the punt full of books, and spend long glorious days away in the forest lying on the green springy carpet of whortleberries, reading. She would most diligently work at furnishing her empty mind. She would sternly endeavour to train it not to jump.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Even if I had convict ancestry, I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. As far as I’m concerned, the real criminals back in those days weren’t twelve-year-old boys nicking a loaf of bread or a pair of socks to ward off hunger and blisters. No, it was those who exploited them; keeping the battler in the gutter while they sat around in their manors, sipping tea and admiring portraits of their toffee-nosed great grandfathers.
Cameron Trost
Be an individual, let out the self that hides away at the expense of others approval.
Nikki Rowe
Remember to afford yourselfthe same generosityyou give to others.
Domonique Bertolucci
If someone knew equally as much about the ins and outs of your home, it would not be your home.
S.A. Tawks
Not asking questions: Giving up on your dreams: Settling for less than you deserve causes you pain, a pain owned by the majority. Be among the few who are inquisitive, forge plans to chase their dreams and take intentional action to live the life aligned with their potential.
Tony Curl
I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
J.M. Coetzee
I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what couldI tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.None of those things, however, came out of my mouth.All I was able to do was turn to Liesel Meminger and tell her the only truth I truly know. I said it to the book thief and I say it now to you.I am haunted by humans.
Markus Zusak
Technology is a means, not an end, no matter how brilliant it appears. How we use digital technology, exploit it and benefit from it depends on old-fashioned political concepts of how we treat each other: how we approach class, race, gender and war and peace. Nothing has changed in that regard. At present, we are ruled by an extreme version of capitalism called 'neoliberalism'. Technology in the service of any extremism has a catastrophic history.
JohnPilger
Because when I dream, I feel no fear, And when I am fearless, I am my most creative self.
Nikki Rowe
The longer you resist the calling of your soul the harder it is to find your way back. Intuition isn't instilled in us for nothing, it's the movement inside us that we must listen to if we want the void to vanish.
Nikki Rowe
At times it may feel hopeless. That life is unforgiving. Breathe. In the hopelessness of life, we find hope and promise. We find strength.
Tania Elizabeth
Scars are just another kind of memory.
M.L Stedman
Humility is an interesting virtue because if you don't have It, sooner or later it's given to you.
Nick Vujicic
In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. But of forty-eight chromosomes only one is different: on this difference we base a complete separation of male and female, pretending as it were that all forty-eight were different.
Germaine Greer
Accept 'what is' they say. What if I don't want to?- Juliette Power
Juliette Power
As we walk back, it feels like the city is engulfing us. Adrenalin still pours through our veins. Sparks flow through to our fingers. We've still been running in the mornings, but the city's different then. It's filled with hope and with bristles of winter sunshine. In the evening, it's like it dies, waiting to be born again the next morning.
Markus Zusak
The typical English painting is narrative in character. The English are a nation of diarists.
Neville Weston
From the pleasure podium of Ali Qapu, beyond the enhanced enclosure, the city spread itself towards the horizon. Ugly buildings are prohibited in Esfahan. They go to Tehran or stay in Mashhad. Planters vie with planners to outnumber buildings with trees. Attracting nightingales, blackbirds and orioles is considered as important as attracting people. Maples line the canals, reaching towards each other with branches linked. Beneath them, people meander, stroll and promenade. The Safavids' high standards generated a kind of architectural pole-vaulting competition in which beauty is the bar, and ever since the Persians have been imbuing the most mundane objects with design. Turquoise tiles ennoble even power stations.In the meadow in the middle of Naghshe Jahan, as lovers strolled or rode in horse-drawn traps, I lay on my back picking four-leafed clovers and looking at the sky. There was an intimacy about its grandeur, like having someone famous in your family. The life of centuries past was more alive here than anywhere else, its physical dimensions unchanged. Even the brutal mountains, folded in light and shadows beyond the square, stood back in awe of it. At three o'clock, the tiled domes soaked up the sunshine, transforming its invisible colours to their own hue, and the gushing fountains ventilated the breeze and passed it on to grateful Esfahanis. But above all was the soaring sky, captured by this snare of arches.(p378)
Christopher Kremmer
History in the storyteller's hand was a potent force indeed,....
Kate Morton
Don’t Seek Happiness - Happiness is like an orgasm: if you think about it too much, it goes away. Keep busy and aim to make someone else happy, and you might find you get some as a side effect. We didn’t evolve to be constantly content. Contented Australopithecus Afarensis got eaten before passing on their genes.
Tim Minchin
They floated for a while, two flesher-shaped creatures and a giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars.
Greg Egan
Maybe it's easier to conform, to stay in a job I hate to pay bills of the things I don't even enjoy and marry a man I'm not passionately in love with, whilst surrounded by those who have absolutely no life to their smile but I don't want easy. I never have. I want a life so fucking grande' I reach every little milestone in sweats or tears knowing I Followed what was true to my heart. I don't care if I walk alone for the rest of my days, if it means I get to stay true to myself.
Nikki Rowe
There's a flame of magic inside every stone & every flower, every bird that sings & every frog that croaks. There's magic in the trees & the hills & the river & the rocks, in the sea & the stars & the wind, a deep, wild magic that's as old as the world itself. It's in you too, my darling girl, and in me, and in every living creature, be it ever so small. Even the dirt I'm sweeping up now is stardust. In fact, all of us are made from the stuff of stars.
Kate Forsyth
I wonder if I'm being disloyal, if being with Didier means I'm forgetting about Jones. But every time I go in a drain, or past a church, I think of him. Every time I see a can of Coke, I think of Jones. And don't even start me on how I feel when I see department-store Santas. A girl doesn't forget a guy like Jones in a big hurry. Even ow, when none of us are front-page news any longer, he's always in my head. My name is Dodie. Doe - as in don't change a thing (well, a couple of things I'd change).Dee - as in delighted to have known you, Sebastian Worthington Jones. Dodie Farnshaw.
Gabrielle Williams
You are worth fighting for.
Truth Devour
Woman cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appea something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate? Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.
Germaine Greer
And you are the girl's bitch, forever.
Alison Goodman
Like icebergs, people normally expose only a small part of themselves, and generally just the part they wish to show.
Nikki Sex
After a while, she murmurs, "What does it mean... what is it to be American?" The question stuns him. That he doesn't know how to answer stuns him more. Or maybe he doesn't know the answer. Maybe certainty is impossible. We're only as real as what we do and what is done to us in the moment; knowing comes much later, if it comes at all. We're jostled by too many acts that we choose to forget.
Merlinda Bobis
And when he got home he started on Mumma. He hated her then, because in her fatness and untidiness and drabness she reminded him of what he himself was when he was sober.
Ruth Park
He looked at me like I was the stars when all I’d ever felt like was the dark nothingness between them.
Ranata Suzuki
The paradox is that without desire, we cannot be successful. When we are striving for desires that will give us what we want and enrich the lives of the people around us directly or indirectly, the Universe works with us to manifest it.
Malti Bhojwani
It was the ultimate celestial orgasm and I felt like a cup overflowing with plenty. The pulse of God moving through me brought such intense pleasure that I felt I might burst like the ripest berry in the sun.
Linda Cull
Many people have stopped growing. When you stop growing, you stop living. Many have stopped living and now just bide their time before it becomes official.
Tony Curl
we attract what is happening in our lives
Rhonda Byrne
My parents are going to kill me!""That seems rather harsh...
Garth Nix