Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 35

The world's an incessant transformation, and to meditateis awareness, with noclinging to,no working on, the mind.It is a floating; ever-moving; 'marvellous emptiness'.Only absorption in such a practice will release usfrom the accidents, and appetites,of life.And upon this leaf one shall cross overthe stormy sea,among the dragon-like waves.
Robert Gray
If you can learn to motivate yourself, you can always tap into an abundance of energy that will drive you to the success you dream of.
Rachael Bermingham
There's a tavern by the docks. He's there most evenings.""Then I'll talk to him tonight," Halt said."You can try. But he's a hard case, Halt. I'm not sure you'll get anything out of him. He's not interested in money. I tried that.""Well, perhaps he'll do it out of the goodness of his heart. I'm sure he'll open up to me," Halt said easily. But Horace noticed a gleam in his eye. He was right: the prospect of having something to do had reawakened Halt's spirits. He had a score to settle, and Horace found himself thinking that it didn't bode well for this Black O'Malley character.Will eyes Halt doubtfully, however. "You think so."Halt smiled at him. "People love talking to me," he said. "I'm an excellent conversationalist and I have a sparkling personality. Ask Horace. I've been bending his ear all the way from Dun Kilty, haven't I?"Horace nodded confirmation. "Talking nonstop all the way, he's been," he said. "Be glad to see him turn all that chatter onto someone else.
John Flanagan
I lost a lot of people when I found myself.
Nikki Rowe
Social media isn't something that you "do", instead you have to "be" social.
Peter Thomson
A cat is always on the wrong side of any door.
Pam Brown
Well if manners maketh man make-up maketh woman.And we don't need a phalanx of behavioural scientists to explain why man judge women by their looks.Because the see bether than thay think.
Kathy Lette
We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don't. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of their group, and continue to do so because they are to well aware of the consequences if they stay away. It's meant to be a joke, but like jokes about mothers-in-law it is founded in bitter truth.
Germaine Greer
I know exactly what Einstein meant when he said, "Dancers are the athletes of God." You three look like angels. I can't wait to see you dancing in the Christmas concert.
Kirsty Murray
He was the safe place I would go when the world became shaky, he would either guide me through the dark or awaken my sense to appreciate my light.
Nikki Rowe
Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing. His skin was a rich pecan color from his dad, who was part African American and part native Hawaiian. His hair, straight and glossy black, and the almond shape of his eyes came from his Japanese grandmother. But their color was the cool blue he'd inherited from his mum, a Swedish windsurfing champion.
Geraldine Brooks
It was nice meeting you three, and I'm sure under different circumstances it would have been a pleasure.
S.A. Tawks
Be captivated by your hearts desire, not distracted by your minds fear.
Nikki Rowe
Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe: 1. Write a simple narrative. 2. Make a long list. 3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.
Jaclyn Moriarty
She was smart like that, and lucky like that, and people loved the hell out of her. They didn’t love the hell out of me; they ran the hell away from me. It wasn’t like I was a bad person or anything, I just … had a lot of accidents. I didn’t mean accidents like I ate glue and then peed myself on a regular basis. I just tripped more than usual, and accidently set things on fire more than what would be considered ‘normal’. I got kicked out of the village school only one moon-cycle before graduation for accidently making one of the teachers bald. How do you accidently make someone bald? That’s a good question. All you really need is a bucket of warm tar to accidently toss onto the back of their head. How do you get a bucket of warm tar? You don’t go looking for it or anything—or at least I didn’t. It was just sitting on the road outside the school and I thought I should carry it inside to ask what it was.
Jaymin Eve
Waiting is often the best part of the story," he explains. "After all, once you know the story, its over.
Ella Frank
Why can’t the world hear? I ask myself. Within a few moments I ask it many times. Because it doesn’t care, I finally answer, and I know I’m right. It’s like I’ve been chosen. But chosen for what? I ask.
Markus Zusak
There’s some comfort in seeing things go on; birds keep singing, buses keep running. But if you want those things to continue, perhaps you have to accept that the other kinds of things, unhappier, even horrific ones, will continue too. And that’s harder.
Ashley Hay
Why didn’t she wake me up?”“Haven’t you heard the expression ‘let sleeping dogs lie’?”Ryan’s eyes narrowed. “Werewolves are not dogs, Shaye. How many times do we need to have this damned conversation?
Franca Storm
Actually Gabriel’s an archangel,” I corrected. “But otherwise, yes.”“Well, that explains why he’s so hard to impress,” said Xavier flippantly
Alexandra Adornetto
The only person who cantake responsibility for yourhappiness is you.
Domonique Bertolucci
The divorce papers remained unopened in the crisp yellow envelope. He had thrown it on his desk without a backward glance. Between his lashes, his dark chocolate eyes burned with fury but there was something else in the depths that she hadn’t seen in a long time, passion.
Suzan Battah
Being yourself is the one thing you can always be the best at because only you can do it.
Ruth G Juliano
For a long time, she sat and saw.She had seen her brother die with one eye open, on still in a dream. She had said goodbye to her mother and imagined her lonely wait for a train back home to oblivion. A woman of wire had laid herself down, her scream traveling the street, till it fell sideways like a rolling coin starved of momentum. A young man was hung by a rope made of Stalingrad snow. She had watched a bomber pilot die in a metal case. She had seen a Jewish man who had twice given her the most beautiful pages of her life marched to a concentration camp. And at the center of all of it, she saw the Fuhrer shouting his words and passing them around.Those images were the world, and it stewed in her as she sat with the lovely books and their manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brims of their bellies with paragraphs and words.
Markus Zusak
My Dear Friend, Don't ever allow yourself to forget how incredibly special you are, even for a single second. Without you, the world would not be as magnificent. Let yourself remember to love again, starting with you loving you.
Miya Yamanouchi
Are you calling us pigs?’ Froi asked, watching as Rafuel winced for the tenth time at the formality of Froi’s Charyn.Rafuel thought for a moment and then nodded.‘Actually yes, I am. Pig-like.’Froi turned back to Trevanion and Perri, who were discussing the need for longbow training in the rock village.‘What is it?’ Perri asked Froi.‘He said we eat like pigs.’Trevanion and Perri thought about it for a moment and then went back to their conversation.
Melina Marchetta
The poker fell from my trembling hands as my entire body shook with reaction. I fell to my knees, pressed my hands to my face and began to sob. What had I done?
A.B. Shepherd
I'm not sure if my dream is a dream, or a nightmare.
Steven Herrick
The reason is that as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, in this time, it is not. It is my bussines, mine alone.'This place being what?''This place being South Africa
J.M. Coetzee
Did you bite someone?' Jack enquired.'I laughed at people, which is much worse. My laughter has sharper teeth than any dog. It tears people apart who wish to be taken seriously, but I could not help myself. There were many complaints and finally a man in a brown suit came and looked at me. He was very important and not used to being laughed at, but I could see he had dandruff on his collar, and there was a spot of his breakfast egg on his lapel. You should have seen him - so puffed up and proud of himself. I couldn't help but laugh and that made people see him as I did, and so they laughed too. All of a sudden everyone realised that for all his status in official matters, he was a man who lived alone and was loveless.
Isobelle Carmody
The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now...cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.
Ben Elton
And at that moment Jude thought something that he would never forgive himself for.He wished that he had never met any of them.
Melina Marchetta
What do you think Amy Poehler is doing right now?
Georgia Clark
The clue to everything a man should love and fear in her was there right from the start in the ironic smile that primed and swelled the archery of her full lips. There was pride in that smile and confidence in the set of her fine nose. Without understanding why I knew beyond question that a lot of people would mistake her pride for arrogance and confuse her confidence with impassivity. I didn't make that mistake. My eyes were lost swimming floating free in the shimmering lagoon of her steady even stare. Her eyes were large and spectacularly green. It was the green that trees are in vivid dreams. It was the green that the sea would be if the sea were perfect.
Gregory David Roberts
Urban Fantasy is the orphan left on the doorstep that no-one knows what to do with.
Tracy Cooper-Posey
The traditional arguments for the existence of God have been fairly thoroughly criticised by philosophers. But the theologian can, if he wishes, accept this criticism. He can admit that no rational proof of God's existence is possible. And he can still retain all that is essential to his position, by holding that God's existence is known in some other, non-rational way. I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be made by way of the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another, so that the theologian can maintain his position as a whole only by a much more extreme rejection of reason than in the former case. He must now be prepared to believe, not merely what cannot be proved, but what can be disproved from other beliefs that he also holds.
John Leslie Mackie
I have lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms. Of all the people of this town I am the one least fitted to write a memorial. Better the blacksmith with his cries of rage and woe.
J.M. Coetzee
...he'd been able to deal with that pain because he'd accepted his own part in causing it
Gregory David Roberts
There was a saying that a man's true character was revealed in defeat. I thought it was also revealed in victory.
Alison Goodman
Let go of the idea of winningor losing. In the game of life,the most important thingis just showing upand doing your best.
Domonique Bertolucci
Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation.
Kate Grenville
[Their marriage] will not be all cakes and ale.... They are too much alike to be the ideal match. Patty is thick-skinned and passionate, too ready to be hurt to the heart by the mere little pinpricks and mosquito bites of life; and Paul is proud and crotchety, and, like the great Napoleon, given to kick the fire with his boots when he is put out. There will be many little gusts of temper, little clouds of misunderstanding, disappointments, and bereavements, and sickness of mind and body; but with all this, they will find their lot so blessed, by reason of the mutual love and sympathy tat, through all the vicissitudes, will surely grow deeper and stronger every day they live together, that they will not know how to conceive a better one.
Ada Cambridge
What if I were seeking a hardcopy? A book I can bury my nose in metaphorically and literally if I'm a self-confessed book-sniffer and proud to say so.
S.A. Tawks
Your doubt survives by stuffing itself with your confidence.
S.A. Tawks
Loneliness is like a big, empty room inside you that echoes with the sounds of the life you're not living.
Leisa Rayven
It hurts that I was just one page in the book of your life…But what hurts more is knowing you’ll revise that chapter someday….….. and you’ll erase me completely.
Ranata Suzuki
Even in sin, the act of love -done with love- is shadowed with divinity. Its conformity may be at fault, but its nature is not altered, and its nature is creative, communicative, splendid in surrender. It was in the splendor of my surrender to Nina and she to me, that I first understood how a man might surrender himself to God -if a God existed. The moment of love is a moment of union -of body and spirit- and the act of faith is mutual and implicit.
Morris West
Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.
Richard Flanagan
But there is no agency in evolution; it is inadvertent. We survived, modified, and multiplied, just like any animal alive today, and out of the wildly dodgem course we took, language arose.
Christine Kenneally
The worlds high on doing and distracting and as result we need to keep doing and it doesn’t really matter what we are doing, as long as it is distracting.
Evan Sutter
If your heart is conflicted, teach it to be unrestricted.
Nikki Rowe
It is in my head! That's why it's called Mental Illness.
Roni Askey-Doran
Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.
Anna Funder
It seemed only right that beauty was the key to the industry, and the sacrificing of beauty to buy possessions seemed only fair to her evolving mind.
Esther Dalseno
Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world.
David Malouf
If you are causing trouble, look for allies, always.
Justine Larbalestier
Believe in yourself, believe in yourdreams and believe in your rightto achieve your dreams.
Domonique Bertolucci
Too many questions can cripple imagination, for how can you apply logical questions to something that is not real?
S.A. Tawks
We do not engage in idle or intentional gossip which undermines someone else's integrity or which spreads the seeds of fear by talking unthinkingly about illness, disasters, and all the other fears which run rampant in the world.
Donna Goddard
She didn't have an answer for that. People like her only ever have questions.
Steven Herrick