Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 23

Even from a very early age, I knew I didn't want to miss out on anything life had to offer just because it might be considered dangerous.
Nicole Kidman
...I long to be known as an extravagant worshiper...that God would discover the song in my heart to be elaborate, overgenerous, and wasteful in my pursuit of Him.
Darlene Zschech
It felt odd to have interrupted the life of someone she knew nothing about, to kill someone she had only just met, as though killing needed intimacy, deep knowledge of the other, to make it all right.
Pamela Freeman
The desire to know the future gnaws at our bones. That is where it started, and might have ended, years ago.I had cast the stones, seeing their faces flicker and fall: Death, Love, Murder, Treachery, Hope. We are a treacherous people - half of our stones show betrayal and violence and death from those close, death from those far away. It is not so with other peoples. I have seen other sets that show only natural disasters: death from sickness, from age, the pain of a broken heart, loss in childbirth. And those stones are more than half full with pleasure and joy and plain, solid warnings like "You reap what you sow" and "Victory is not the same as satisfaction."Of course, we live in a land taken by force, by battle and murder and invasion. It is not so surprising that our stones reflect our history.
Pamela Freeman
The Proclaimers thunder through my head.Imagine it.Imagine killing someone to the tune of two Scottish nerds wearing glasses and flattop haircuts. How will I ever listen to that song again? What will I do if it comes on the radio? I'll think of the night I murdered another man and stole his life with my own hands.
Markus Zusak
You see, in their last moments people show you who they really are.
The Joker Heath Ledger
I guess whoever built and buried that IED out there in the desert will never know how far that blast traveled. But all things ripple out, cause shrapnel.
Lucy Christopher
I remember having an argument with Alan, I said the Queen's not just going to call the guy up and send him out to do it. And Alan says, well, how would a monarch give orders to her assassin.
Eddie Campbell
It was easy to imagine the beginning of time here, but also, perhaps, its end.
Chris Womersley
[S]he was in a pretty crazy place, screaming and waving the bucket-knife around, spattered with blood from head to toe. Lee was lying on the floor, quietly pumping out his life through his throat.
Max Barry
Don't make me kill you at this hour in the morning Jimmy. It's not civilized.
Kylie Scott
That's blackmail on top of attempted murder, Kye. I can officially kill you
Keri Arthur
Nobody in school is stronger than me. But when Sally Holmes kissed me, I never felt so weak in all my life.
Steven Herrick
I tell him about ... Jack and Annabel, smart and ready and I'm wondering where all that smart comes from and I figure some from parents, some from school, and some from a place inside you.
Steven Herrick
You went to school," Lee said. "I mean, at some point. And it didn't suit you very well. They wanted to teach you things you didn't care about. Dates and math and trivia about dead presidents. They didn't teach persuasion. Your ability to persuade is the single most important determinant of your quality of life, and they didn't cover that at all. Well, we do. And we're looking for students with natural aptitude.
Max Barry
Great. Now Renata would have even more reason to dislike her. Jane would have an enemy. The last time she had had anything close to an enemy, she was in primary school herself. It had never crossed her mind that sending your child to school would be like going back to school yourself.
Liane Moriarty
School never teaches you about this mangled human slime, it slays me. You spend all your time learning the capital of Surinam while these retards carve their initials in your back.
D.B.C. Pierre
Where there is true variety, there will be inevitable 'inequality' - that is simply the result of human nature and the pluralism that defines us as a people.
Cory Bernardi
When men and women produce a baby together for the first time, it's an absolute festival of mutual incompetence.
Annabel Crabb
When men and women produce a baby together for the first time, it's an absolute festival of mutual incompetence.From The Wife Drought
Annabel Crabb
Your hearing status doesn't make you a better person. Your humanity does.
Rosie Malezer
Never place yourself above your fellow man, for we are all, each and every one of us, born of equal rights to the nourishing earth beneath and the wonder of the stars above.
Becca Lee
The prescription of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings.
Peter Singer
Dreams be the speech of thy soul. Listen.
Tania Elizabeth
I have everything under control. It's time you realized it and let me be who I am.
Sean Williams
Stop trying to control how you feel, and instead take control of what you do.
Russ Harris
The fact that you can act with love even when you don’t feel love is very empowering. Why? Because whereas the feelings of love are fleeting and largely out of your control, you can take the actions of love anytime and anyplace for the whole rest of your life.
Russ Harris
Maybe her husband was right: maybe change didn't necessarily mean disaster. Maybe the mess of life was the very thing she was supposed to enjoy instead of always fighting it, trying to impose order. The universe was trying to tell her something - was it, perhaps, to let go?
Wendy Francis
Don't you find it strange that your mother would leave you?' Becky said. 'I can't imagine my other leaving me.'I'd never thought of it like that before. 'I don't think she knew what else to do.
Belinda Jeffrey
Two brothers. Two different worlds. Different mothers, of course. Did that explain it? Women usually explained everything.
Margaret Way
Even her pink bunny slippers seem to prick up their ears.
Sally Harris
Mothering your man is not sexy for you or for him. If you want your man to "start being a man", start being his lover not his mother.
Miya Yamanouchi
We all intuitively know that a mother's love is crucial to the creation of a well-adjusted human and that we are all born with an instinctive expectation of receiving unconditionally selfless love from our mother.
Jeremy Griffith
There is always the fantasy of maternal love, but it does not accommodate a mother's fear of her children.
Stephanie Bishop
Listen, ah don't wanna speak ill of the dead but have ah told you that mah mother was a great whopping whale of a cunt? Well she was precisely that - a great whopping whale of a hog's cunt with a dirty maggot for a brain.
Nick Cave
Affection makes fools. Always, without exception, love digs a channel that's sooner or later flooded by the briny water of despair.
Sonya Hartnett
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
So now I just assume that it won't work, and that if it does work, I'll lose it anyway. This is meant to protect me, although it doesn't, because somehow the hope sneakily finds its way in. I'm never aware of the hope until it's gone, whooshed away like a rug pulled from under my feet, each time I hear another "I'm sorry.
Liane Moriarty
The air in my home is heavy with my mom's unhappiness. And her exhaustion. And her sheer dissatisfaction with her life. And I hate it. I can be up in my room when she's in the kitchen below and I feel her despair seeping up through the floorboards. You can hear her banging pots and pans or cursing the vacuum cleaner
Laura Buzo
The pages aren't numbered, so I don't know whether I have the beginning or end or whether it's in sequence but these days I'm not really looking for continuity.All I'm after is something that makes sense to me.
Melina Marchetta
But I want to give in to it sometimes, only because I'm tired and the feeling that I've had for a while-that something is haunting me down-becomes all consuming and I'm frightened that one morning there will be not enough to keep me going.
Melina Marchetta
If she allowed herself to give in to the whole sadness of it, she'd never ever be able to operate like a normal person again.
Melina Marchetta
...only more keenly aware of how her soul starved within her, its wings wasting with the despair of disuse.
Alison Croggon
the thing is you can get used to anything you think you cant you want to die but you dont you cant you just are
Elizabeth Scott
People who have outrageous skills and abilities are the gold nuggets in the river bed of human history.
Michael Pryor
Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.
Adrian McKinty
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
People observe the colors of a day at its beginnings and ends, but to me it's quiet clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment.
Markus Zusak
The truth is, the hypocrisy of humans is everywhere
Jeremy Griffith
Human beings love, despite their compulsions to limit it and exploit it chaotically. Their love persuades them to make vows, build houses and turn their passion ultimately to duty.
Germaine Greer
I sometimes think that animals are incapable of the kinds of cruelty that humans willingly inflict on each other.
Belinda Jeffrey
Just so you know,’ I explained, remembering my own earlier arrogance, ‘if you’ve ever owned a cat and therefore think you know how to handle a puma, you don’t. It would be like playing with sharks because you once owned a goldfish.
Peter Allison
But after dealing with Roy for a while I just wanted to get through the time I’d signed on for, to prove to myself that I couldn’t be beaten by a girly-faced, chicken-boned, racist cat.
Peter Allison
No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness that we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?
J.M. Coetzee
Sometimes you had to make the animals perform.
Matthew Reilly
At last, I came to the Lost Dog's Home which my map told me marked teh turnoff to Shelly Beach.You could hear some of the dogs barking, calling out for their owners to come and get them away from there...I hated going to those places because I always wanted to take all the dogs home or let them go free, even though I knew most of them would go straight out and be hit by a car or starve to death. I sometimes wished I could have a place where I could take those dogs and let them live. The Phantom had this sanctuary called Eden and all the animals there lived together, even tigers and baby deer, because they'd never learned it's kill or be killed. The maneaters ate fish out of the lagoon and the island was protected by the Bandar poison pygmies and by the piranha fish in the lagoon. I would have liked there to be such a place for pets who had been dumped of abandoned. They could feed the owners to the piranha.
Isobelle Carmody
But it was not the poor who ate the zoo animals in Paris.
Ceridwen Dovey
I believe we as humans are meant to have a bond and a connection with all of life itself, and our animals are trying to open our hearts to it.
Catherine Louise Birmingham
If we have learned anything from the liberation movements, we should have learned how difficult it is to be aware of the ways in which we discriminate until they are forcefully pointed out to us. A liberation movement demands an expansion of our moral horizons, so that practices that were previously regarded as natural and inevitable are now seen as intolerable.
Peter Singer
The dogs were really keening now, like Irish widows.
Thomas Keneally