Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 4

I don't believe in miracles, only unexplained facts.
Morris West
I thought about how stupid it is, that all of us are born destined to desire somebody else, though desire brings with it such disappointment and pain. Humankind's history must be scored bloody with heartbreak. This hankering for affection is a blight upon us.
Sonya Hartnett
I didn't wait for Luck. I raced after it with a truck.
A.A. Bell
Some mysteries are meant to stay that way.
Truth Devour
Instead of complaining about your situation, actually do something about it. Playing "poor me" just ain't sexy.
Miya Yamanouchi
Real is better, The truth is better. Painful but better.
Cath Crowley
I can no longer cry. I groan a few times. Through the slits that are my eyes, I stare at my shoes, at the gray swirls of the concrete floor, at the bright orange lid of my syringe. And I realize—it’s a kind of horror—that this is my life.And I can’t stop. I just can’t stop. I can’t stop anymore.
Luke Davies
I can understand why you would want to be literally out of your own heard, because being inside your own head is unbearable.
Alyssa Brugman
David set me to learn other skills, too, in those days of restless waiting.
Geraldine Brooks
I can't tell you why God made you the way you are any more than I can tell you why he's planted a carcinoma in my stomach to make me die painfully while other men die peacefully in their sleep. The cogs of creation seem to slip all the time. Babies are born with two heads, mothers of families run crazy with carving knives, men die in plague, famine and thunderstorms. Why? Only God knows.
Morris West
There were tough thoughts battling one another inside his head for the right to become reality.
S.A. Tawks
If we constantly rewrite history to fit how we see things now, we forget how things used to be and, equally important to future scholars, how we used to see them.
Anne Summers
By fire, fever, storm and sword, your blood shall suffer this bane. No peace or joy for Wintersloe's lord, till the puzzle ring is whole again
Kate Forsyth
The mind you use to try to see your true self does not recognise if it has never seen. Once you stop looking within and realise you are the one doing the looking to recognise yourself, the mind will understand.
Dee-Anne Hayes
It is at Easter that Jesus is most human, and like all humans, he fails and is failed. His is not an all-powerful God, it is an all-vulnerable God.
Michael Leunig
There is nothing wrong with loving your work and wanting to apply yourself to it. But there is so much more to life. Balance is what is important, maintaining balance.
Bronnie Ware
Those miserable women who blame the men who let them down for their misery and isolation enact every day the initial mistake of sacrificing their personal responsibility for themselves.
Germaine Greer
A tree’s most important means of staying connected to other trees is a “wood wide web” of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods.
Tim Flannery
In family life love is the oil that eases friction the cement that binds closer together and the music that brings harmony.
Eva Burrows
The years lay spread out before her, spacious untouched canvases on which she was presently going to paint the picture of her life. It was to be a very beautiful picture, she said to herself with an extraordinary feeling of proud confidence; not beautiful because of any gifts or skill of hers, for never was a woman more giftless, but because of all the untiring little touches, the ceaseless care for detail, the patient painting out of mistakes; and every touch and every detail was going to be aglow with the bright colours of happiness.
Elizabeth von Arnim
She looked at me with those empty eyes, and I thought, I'm going to make sure I fill them up with something.
Cath Crowley
Mastering my mind one thought at a time.
Nikki Rowe
We speak for those who cannot speak. We have a duty to tell the stories for those who do not have the advantages that we have to tell stories. We must not speak falsely. The stories that we are entrusted to tell are stories of our tribes, or the tribes into which we have been initiated.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
It felt as though the whole globe was dressed in snow. Like it has pulled it on, the way you pull on a sweater. Next to the train line, footprints were sunken to their shins. Trees wore blankets of ice. As you may expect, someone has died.
Markus Zusak
Woman magic. A quality that could bring great joy or havoc or both in equal measure.
Margaret Way
No one can give you that which you can find within yourself.
Belsebuub
Most of the things youfind yourself wantingwill have little or no bearingon the happiness in your life.
Domonique Bertolucci
The "fashion-beauty complex'," representing the corporate interests involved in the fashion and beauty industries, has, Bartky argues, taken over from the family and church as "central producers and regulators of 'femininity'" (1990, p. 39). The fashion-beauty complex promotes itself to women as seeking to, "glorify the female body and to provide opportunities for narcissistic indulgence'' but in fact its aim is to "depreciate woman's body and deal a blow to her narcissism'' so that she will buy more products. The result is that a woman feels constantly deficient and that her body requires "either alteration or else heroic measures merely to conserve it'' (p. 39).
Sheila Jeffreys
a young man is still a boy, and a boy sometimes has the right to be stubborn.
Markus Zusak
Fantasy stories will always be popular, as there are always readers who are willing to escape, freely, to the worlds that the authors create, and spend time with the characters we give life to.
Jason Ellis
Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure! Always your goal is pleasure. Pain, yes of course! Yet pain must only be used as a means to add to your sub's sensation of pleasure. To do otherwise is un péché noir - a black sin. Such will tarnish the soul. André Chevalier
Nikki Sex
I blame what happened next on the door. The one right across the hall from me, a mere three feet away. I love doors. All of them, without exception. Doors lead to things and I’ve never met one I haven’t wanted to open. All the same, if that door hadn’t been so old and decorative, so decidedly closed, if a thread of light hadn’t positioned itself with such wretched temptation across its middle, highlighting the keyhole and its intriguing key, perhaps I might have stood a chance; remained twiddling my thumbs until Percy came to collect me. But it was and I didn’t; I maintain that I simply couldn’t. Sometimes, you can tell just by looking at a door there’s something interesting behind it.
Kate Morton
We draw into our life those who will help us to grow. Naturally, we tend to have mixed feelings about those very people but they are marked for us. We have forgotten that we wrote them an invitation some time ago. We look at them as if they are intruders when all along they are our guests.
Donna Goddard
They're a group called The Spirit-crushers and their leader is known as The Almighty Spirit-crusher.
S.A. Tawks
There will come a time when a person you most likely pushed out through your vagina and nursed from yournipples, whose bottom you wiped, and whose snot and spit you cleaned up over several sleep-starved years will apprehend you with a mixture of boredom and irritation and say, ‘Get a life, Mum.’This would be a good time to remember that a) violence never solved anything; b) teenagers don’t have a full brain yet – the prefrontal cortex that controls the ability to make important distinctions, like who controls the pocket money, only kicks in around the age of twenty-four; and c) you are, in fact, the adult.
Joanne Fedler
Only in drama does it end with the tragedy; in life it grinds on. Moanday, tearsday, happy days, right through to Shatterdays. And Again.
Gayla Reid
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
It sounds like a terrible idea,” said Friday. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t work.
R.A. Spratt
Their heartbeats fought each other, a mess of rhythm. Liesel tried to eat hers down. The taste of heart was not too cheerful.
Markus Zusak
Who would awaken the past? It shines like a sunriseAnd cuts like a fine blade.
Juliet Marillier
Afterwards Isabelle often wondered if the moments themselves were greater or the memory of them. At least the memory did not pass, while the moments passed all too fast. Life whizzed by; she no longer had time to recollect it. Her notebooks to this day retain the story of her desperate attempt to hold together her self, her mind, her reason, her order, her morals.
Toni Bentley
Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea of the world... But there are other people to do these things - the animal welfare thing, the social rehabilitation thing, even the Byron thing. He saves the honour of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it.
J.M. Coetzee
Everything is energy. You are an energy magnet, so you electrically energize everything to you and electrically energize yourself to everything you want
Rhonda Byrne
The thing is, there is no certainty in this life - in one second your entire world could shift. I'm not saying it will, but I am living proof that It can. We never prepare for tragedy and that's a good thing but my god what's it's taught me is how little we appreciate what we have or some cases once had.
Nikki Rowe
Our destinies are riddled with challenges that have a tendency to ruin well laid plans. Many have attempted to take fate into their own hands and have been unsuccessful in changing it.Others find that their paths differ from what they have dreamed for themselves. We must be aware that our choices may come back to haunt us later in life, but to trust that is is all part of fate's desing.
Peter Koevari
...what science cannot explain is the psychic effect of this 'mother of all plants,' the sense of the numinous and the spiritual world it reportedly opens up. Those who drink say that each ayahuasca journey is unique. They say that the spirit of the vine comes alive, it guides and teaches, and on the other side nothing is ever the same. Or so they say.
Rak Razam
I have been smashed and put back together so many times nothing works right. Nothing is where it should be, heavy thumping in my shoulder where my heart now beats.
Elizabeth Scott
I've sequenced the questions for maximum speed of elimination,’ I explained. ‘I believe I can eliminate most women in less than forty seconds. Then you can choose the topic of discussion for the remaining time.’ ‘But then it won’t matter,’ said Frances. ‘I’ll have been eliminated.’ ‘Only as a potential partner. We may still be able to have an interesting discussion.’ ‘But I’ll have been eliminated.’ I nodded. ‘Do you smoke?’ ‘Occasionally,’ she said. I put the questionnaire away. ‘Excellent.’ I was pleased that my question sequencing was working so well. We could have wasted time talking about ice-cream flavours and make-up only to find that she smoked. Needless to say, smoking was not negotiable. ‘No more questions. What would you like to discuss?
Graeme Simsion
Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.
Luke Davies
How many times did we pass each other before we met? If only I’d known…. I would have searched for you endlessly.If only I’d found you before it was already too late.
Ranata Suzuki
With privilege comes responsibility, you must understand that. People expect us to lead by example and we shall not disappoint them.
Ben Elton
I knew it was Peter playing. I fancied he was trying to tell me something - an absurd idea, but it persisted - 'I may not be able to spell, but just you listen to this.
Jennifer Paynter
It's a nice feeling, Knowing, Someone lived easier Because I was alive.
Nikki Rowe
Choose to be the best version of you.
Truth Devour
Acknowledge yourself for your greatness and your instincts and know that you always do your best even when the outcomes don’t appear that way.
Malti Bhojwani
She tasted good. Like salt and vinegar chips and Bailey’s Irish cream. Who knew that was such a fucking turn on?
Amy Andrews
[S]ocial change is not clearly linear and rarely totally beneficial or detrimental. Social change nearly nearly always produces positive and negative effects that are distributed differentially in the affected population.
Peter Conrad
The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading. It isn’t achieved by the book alone, nor by the child alone, nor by the adult who’s reading aloud—it’s the relationship winding between all three, bringing them together in easy harmony.
Mem Fox
Not knowing anything, not searching for anything, understanding that we can’t hold on to anything, leaves us with nothing — nothing except our original nature, pure awareness.
Enza Vita
The difference between faith and insanity is that faith is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence, whereas insanity is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence.
William Harwood