David Malouf Quotes

He had entered the rough world of men, where a man's acts follow him wherever he goes in the form of story.

What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.

But here we call it Spring, when a young man’s fancy turns,fitfully, lightly, to idling in the sun,to touching in the dark. And the old man's?To worms in their garden box; stepping asidea moment in a poem that will remember,fitfully, who made it and the discordand stammer, and change of heart and catch of breathit sprang from. A bending downlightly to touch the earth.

And if other old men must be willing, at the end, to push up off their deathbed and adventure out into the unknown, how much more willing must that man be whose whole life has been just such a daily exercise of adventuring, even in the stillness of his own garden? I mean, the poet.

So these things happen, deep in our lives. We do not speak of them. We hide them even from ourselves, but they do not leave us.