Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 11

For spiritual change, we need to see and understand ourselves. What sees is consciousness, it is what perceives, and is essentially what we are. To understand ourselves we need to look within and study how we think and feel, and doing that is called self-observation.
Belsebuub
Awareness of freedom and responsibility creates anxiety, which is also referred to as anguish or angst. Aspects of romantic attachments can relieve anxieties. For example, Mario Mikulincer et al. argue that loving relationships can act as a "death-anxiety buffering mechanism", since the sense of security, protection, comfort, self-esteem, and social validation that close relationships provide may serve as defensive devices with respect to existential anxiety about the threat of mortality.
Skye Cleary
First, a bath. I'm feeling soiled. Too much contact with cold reality, I think.
Kerry Greenwood
What level of personal are we talking about?" she mumbled. "I don't mind discussing my periods in graphic detail, but I'm probably going to stay quiet about the jar of fingernail clippings I carry with me at all times.
Darcy Coates
I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I even 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...I AM HAUNTED BY HUMANS.
Markus Zusak
I remember passion.
Melina Marchetta
Poetry is the struggle against the simplification, codification, and mummification of language, it serves as a constant redirect - moving us to the experience to which the words point.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
Do you think there could be a universe next door?
Jaclyn Moriarty
I lay there with my mind running amuck, on the brink of madness. And somehow, gradually, early Sunday morning, I became calm. I can't think of any other word for it. I was thinking about the beach poem again, and I started to feel that I was being looked after, that everything was OK. It was strange: if there was ever a time in my life when I had the right to feel alone this was it. But I lost that sense of loneliness. I felt like there was a force in the room with me, not a person, but I had a sense that there was another world, another dimension, and it would be looking after me. It was like, "This isn't the only world, this is just one aspect of the whole thing, don't imagine this is all there is.
John Marsden
...the place I was bound for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with living, first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two and eighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to me the older I grow. There has been nothing in the least like them since; and though I have forgotten most of what happened six months ago, every incident, almost every day of those wonderful long years is perfectly distinct in my memory.
Elizabeth von Arnim
All that he had of her was his memory, where he held every moment, every single moment that she had been his. That was all he had, to keep out the loneliness.
Juliet Marillier
What life can you create when those activities spent “killing” or “wasting” time were put into the quest for a better you? What would your life be like if instead of “chilling and net flicks” you devoted time to wellness and thinking? A much better life awaits you with some simple choices, backed by intentional actions.
Tony Curl
I often had thoughts of vengeance, but I never felt they consumed me. In the days after our conversation, I thought about what Lee had said about Lydia’s killer having a new beginning in a different life. I didn’t want it to get in the way of justice, but didn’t everyone deserve a chance to begin again and become a better person? I think Lee knew he could reach my spirit of fairness, and as a human being –or near enough to one, it seemed unfathomable that someone should be made to pay for their past-life transgressions in a future life. I suppose that’s what karma was, in a way, just very different from an avenging fae. It didn’t mean I wouldn’t punish him, of course, if I had the chance.
Cailee Francis
How strange it would now — like speaking without a voice. Is that what music is then, a ventriloquist with his doll ?
John Marsden
Tracker Marks was of a different opinion. Though he seemed more white than a white man, he had no time for their ways. For him his dress, his deportment was no different than staying downwind in the shadows of trees when hunting, blending into the world of those he hunted, rather than standing out from it. Once he had excelled at the emu dance & the kangaroo dance; then his talent led him to the whitefella dance, only now no-one was left of his tribe to stand around the fire & laugh & praise his talent for observation & stealthy imitation.The whites have no law, he told Capois Death, no dreaming. Their way of life made no sense whatsoever. Still, he did not hate them or despise them. They were stupid beyond belief, but they had a power, & somehow their stupidity & their power were, in Tracker Marks’s mind, inextricably connected. But how? he asked Capois Death. How can power & ignorance sleep together? Questions to which Capois Death had no answer.
Richard Flanagan
He closed the pages and stuffed them back into his jacket. Keeping his eyes cast downwards as he sipped his wine, he pulled out and lit a cigarette – almost a post-coital gesture. from The Willow Lake Group by Kelly Proudfoot
Kelly Proudfoot
In the absence of a story or foundation that gives hope or meaning, life has become a never-ending quest for pleasure and experience. Instead of being good, people want to feel good.
Mark Sayers
All of them. Fated to love in vain.
Anne Rouen
Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Life's harder, the deeper you feel things, was all I could think as I put the books away. Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.
John Marsden
A story is a wondrous invention.
Chris Womersley
Who lives inside your head? The hero of your story OR The victim of someone else's?
Tony Curl
I think people get lost in becoming someone other then themselves when they spend too much time in the presence of those who don't bring out the best in them.
Nikki Rowe
oh darling, The darkness is a gift, And when you realise this, You will never be defeatedAgain.
Nikki Rowe
Treat backstory like a pungent spice. I say this to encourage you to picture a jalapeno pepper that can set your mouth on fire, every time you even think about adding backstory into your book. What you need is subtlety.
Sandy Vaile
You can give illness to her body but you can't take the gypsy out of that girl.
Nikki Rowe
Each today, well-lived, makes yesterday a dream of happiness and each tomorrow a vision of hope. Look, therefore, to this one day, for it and it alone is life.” —Sanskrit poem
Robin Craig Clark
Human beings are drawn to cats because they are all we are not — self-contained, elegant in everything they do, relaxed, assured, glad of company, yet still possessing secret lives.
Pam Brown
I don’t think you ever really understood….…. All the love I had in the world went to you.
Ranata Suzuki
Perhaps this new kind of reading will appeal to us after we give it a try.
S.A. Tawks
A small but noteworthy note. I've seen so many young men over the years who think they're running at other young men. They are not. They are running at me.
Markus Zusak
Killing things shouldn't make you happy, Rosa. That's why they're worried.
Justine Larbalestier
Loss leaves us empty- but learn not to close your heart and mind to grief. Allow life to replinish you. When sorrow comes it seems impossible- but new
Pam Brown
You won't forget a woman like her, easily anyway. Once you cross paths with Magic it's hard to see life the same.
Nikki Rowe
I deliberately seek out the colors to keep my mind off them, but now and then, I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling among the jigsaw puzzle of realization, despair and surprise.
Markus Zusak
If we're not growing we must feel guilty because we are not fulfilling Christ's demand.
Eva Burrows
....he will always live in a place he is not from. For a long time he thought that habit would counter this fact and custom would disguise it. He thought, in the beginning, that such things would not matter in the long run. But they did, they do, they always will.
Stephanie Bishop
Whatever actions you take, keep in mind that over the course of life, you will fail far more from timidity, procrastination, and carefulness than you will from just stepping up to the plate and, as we say in Australia, giving it a bloody go!
Margie Warrell
Laughter is a very underrated tool for healing.
Bronnie Ware
Valuing a writer only for their diversity, but not their humanity or talent – that’s tokenism.
Sunili Govinnage
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
Wisdom is not increased by acquiring more information, but by increasing the capacity of seeing.
Belsebuub
Whatever experiences we may come across in our spiritual journey we are not any of those experiences but rather the one who is witnessing them, the pure awareness cognizing them without thought.
Enza Vita
Finishing my thoughts aloud meant saying how my dad had passed, and I had failed. How I had smoked joints and lay in bed enabling my hopelessness. I’d been the ugly in my world.
Rebecca Berto
Communication is defined not by what is being said but by what is being heard. For this reason, it is vital that you gain a good appreciation of how other people will listen—interpret, process, and assign meaning— to what you have to say before you can influence them effectively.
Margie Warrell
You know who you are you just have to believe it.
Elizabeth Scott
He had no idea that he never went out of the house without her blessing going with him too, hovering, like a little echo of finished love, round that once dear head
Elizabeth von Arnim
[Lunch] was composed of one of the fish she had caught, evidently rescued from Mogget. This had been grilled with ginger, pepper, and some spice she didn't know, set atop a salad of grains and greenleaf, accompanied by a lightly sparkling clear wine she had to admit was delicious and refreshing.
Garth Nix
All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
Clive James
Julesa: "Are you a fool? Father will have you hung if he realises you've escaped."Never: "Everyone dies from something.
Ashley Capes
I like being full of mystery and wonder, people always know im up to something but never know exactly what.
Nikki Rowe
Cancer though, it was a fickle friend that didn't care about your age, gender or race. It would move in take up residence and eventually kick you to the curb, it was a mean landlord and didn't care who it hurt in order to get what it wanted.
Ella Frank
Earlier in this book I noted that one of my favorite sayings is “You get what you tolerate.” This applies in spades to your relationships. Failing to speak up about something carries the implication that you are OK with it—that you are prepared to continue tolerating it. As a companion saying goes, “Silence means consent.” If you tolerate snide or offensive remarks from your boss or colleague, the remarks will continue. If you tolerate your spouse’s lack of consideration for your feelings, it will continue. If you tolerate the disregard of people who regularly turn up late for meetings or social engagements, they will continue to keep you cooling your heels. If you tolerate your child’s lack of respect, you will continue to get no respect. Each time you tolerate a behavior, you are subtly teaching that person that it is OK to treat you that way.
Margie Warrell
It was easy to imagine the beginning of time here, but also, perhaps, its end.
Chris Womersley
My speak a language my heart knows how to respond to.
Nikki Rowe
In the popular imagination hairiness is like furriness, an index of bestiality, and as such an indication of aggressive sexuality. Men cultivate it, just as they are encouraged to develop competitive and aggressive instincts, women suppress it, just as they suppress all the aspects of their vigour and libido.
Germaine Greer
I believe that everyone in the world is crazy except you and me. And even you're a little bit strange.
Christopher Doyle
While the heart beats, hope lingers.
Alison Croggon
In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he has fallen into a waking dream, a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on two continents, some from so far away in time that he barely recognizes them. Like leaves blown on the wind, pell-mell, they pass before him. A fair field full of folk: hundreds of lives all tangled with his. He holds his breath, willing the vision to continue.What has happened to them, all those women, all those lives? Are there moments when they too, or some of them, are plunged without warning into the ocean of memory? The German girl: is it possible that at this very instant she is remembering the man who picked her up on the roadside in Africa and spent the night with her? Enriched: that was the word the newspapers picked on to jeer at. A stupid word to let slip, under the circumstances, yet now, at this moment, he would stand by it. By Melanie, by the girl in Touws River; by Rosalind, Bev Shaw, Soraya: by each of them he was enriched, and by the others too, even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness.
J.M. Coetzee
She kept hoping something would change, but she knew she'd lost him to a world she could never be part of. So instead she pretended.Pretended to be strong.Pretended everything was alright.Pretended for Michael, for herself, but most of all for Willow. Because Willow loved Michael, and he, her – that much was obvious
Dominique Wilson