Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 3

Fireworks made of glass. An explosion of dew. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Silence.There are drugs that work the same, and while I am not suggesting that our founder purchased the glassworks to get more drops, it is clear that she had the seed planted, not once, but twice, and knew already the lovely contradictory nature of glass and she did not have to be told, on the day she saw the works at Darling Harbour, that glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid, that an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at the top, and that even while it is as frail as the ice on a Parramatta puddle, it is stronger under compression than Sydney sandstone, that it is invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from.
Peter Carey
She wasn't ordinary, I liked her that way. Mystery oozed from her pours as she walked so lightly I could have mistaken her for an angel.
Nikki Rowe
When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,' Miriam says.
Anna Funder
But if you take pleasure in morality, then you are always in deficit.
Brian Castro
The thing is, I don't even hate cops. To tell you the truth, I actually feel a little sorry for them.
Markus Zusak
When the anger is intense, the person with Asperger's syndrome may be in a 'blind rage' and unable to see the signals indicating that it would be appropriate to stop. Feelings of anger can also be in response in situations where we would expect other emotions. I have noted that sadness may be expressed as anger.
Tony Attwood
How vigilant we must be to ensure that we don’t allow our impression of Jesus to be held captive by the prevailing mores of our secular culture! Rather, it is essential that we continue to return to the Gospels to ensure that the reverse occurs: to allow Jesus to hold our hearts and imaginations captive in response to the dominant thinking of our time. For exiles trying to live faithfully within the host empire of post-Christendom, the Gospel stories are our most dangerous memories. They continue to fire our imaginations and remind us that it’s possible to thrive on foreign soil while serving Yahweh, but it’s the kind of thriving that often rejects popular wisdom. These stories are the standard by which we judge all other stories, all other descriptors of life today. If, after reading these dangerous biblical stories, you can’t imagine Jesus the Messiah as a televangelist, strutting around on stage in a flashy suit, playing it up for the cameras, then you are forced to reject this image and seek another mode of being Christ today.
Michael Frost
Never underestimate what you can accomplish when you believe in yourself. (Unknown)
D.J. Stutley
You are my treasure.
Truth Devour
He was the second snowman to be melting away before her eyes, only this one was different. It was a paradox. The colder he became, the more he melted.
Markus Zusak
it strikes me that the writers most deeply concerned with the state of literary fiction and its biases against women could do a lot worse than trying to coin some terms of their own: to name the archetypes they wish to invert or criticise and thereby open up the discussion. If authors can be thought of as magicians in any sense, then the root of our power has always rested with words: choosing them, arranging them and – most powerfully – inventing them. Sexism won’t go away overnight, and nor will literary bias. But until then, if we’re determined to invest ourselves in bringing about those changes, it only makes sense to arm ourselves with a language that we, and not our enemies, have chosen.May 14, 2011 Blog post
Foz Meadows
To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.
J.M. Coetzee
Acting with confidence, but inside lacking certainty, I'd told her I could.
S.A. Tawks
It was my duty as a mother to invade your privacy and search your room. I'm just glad you weren't hiding an illegal drug.
S.A. Tawks
He seemed like he was baiting me to ask, like he wanted me to know his troubles but wanted me to ask first.
S.A. Tawks
It was odd but I couldn't jump the chasm of missing evidence to the conclusion Todd was making.
S.A. Tawks
Being determined delinquents, Peyton and I jumped the barricades and wandered around the dilapidated interior.
S.A. Tawks
If you're not happy with yourself, how can you even begin to figure out if another person makes you happy, annoyed, angry, sad and so on.
S.A. Tawks
Someone who lives vicariously will never be truly happy because they're not happy with themselves.
S.A. Tawks
Secret elisions within families are suddenly revealed by self-execution, and just as quickly sheeted with excuses, blame, and counter-blame. But sense is made of the world only through relationship between action and reaction, symptom and cause. No change is possible without analysis of accountability.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Self respect by definition is a confidence and pride in feeling that you are behaving in an honorable and dignified manner. -Respect yourself by respecting others.
Miya Yamanouchi
Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre
Robert Hughes
Yes, you ARE important enough; and yes, your needs and wants DO matter.
Miya Yamanouchi
You are never alone as long as you are in the company of your precious self.
Miya Yamanouchi
In the night, I am kept awake by the endless chatter of my inner self. I hear it speak softly of old hurts and fondly of past loves, while its demands and anxieties resound throughout me in multitudes.I could be calm and composed all day long, but the moment it is dark, my mind riots.
Beau Taplin
I tried talking to Jesus, but he just put me on hold...
Colin Hay
My best memory of school was probably leaving school. Because I hated that fucking place.
Troye Sivan
'Maybe you out to go back there.' 'Can't. Gotta stay where... where I know what's w
Lisa Henry
To be an ethical leader is indeed to be different. This kind of leader acknowledges the complexity of running a responsible business, yet tries to do it anyway.
Andrew Leigh
Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of Power Point slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies. I don’t understand these things.
Max Barry
See, I was never a guy who had a whole heap of friends to belong to. Besides Greg Fienni, I never really had friends. I kind of stayed on my own. I hated it, but I was proud of it too. Cameron Wolfe needed no one. He didn't need to be amongst a pack. Not all of us roam like that. No, all he needed was his instincts. All he needed was himself.
Markus Zusak
And I thought Ereaders could not become any more dreadful.
S.A. Tawks
Over the years I've really believed when you think you're in danger, you are probably not and when you have no idea, you probably are.
Rodney Cocks
She brushed the tears from their faces and sang them a melancholy lullaby. Her obvious devotion to her daughters pulled at my heart strings, making my chest ache with longing for my own mother.
A.B. Shepherd
I've never been the most important thing to anybody - not even myself.
Ranata Suzuki
Suffering is so real & I walk amongst so many who have no idea how much my soul is aching to be healed.
Nikki Rowe
I didn't have enough other people in my life to cover the loss of this many people at once. I didn't have spare aunties or cousins or grandparents. I didn't have backup. I didn't have insurance to cover a loss like this.
Liane Moriarty
The only person you should ever fear losing in a relationship is you yourself.
Miya Yamanouchi
Laine taped the last box shut. That was it, then: All of Gavin's belongings put away; some for charity, some for the dump, some to be saved for a happier 'one day' that Laine felt, right now, was as distant as the stars.
Stephen M. Irwin
Laine slowly rolled out of bed. The queen size was one of the few new things in the house. But now, even the new bed felt tainted. It was an inner-spring monument to lies, a petri dish of mendacity she had shared with her faithless husband, and shared now with creeping dreams that flew from the light but left harsh scratches and diseased black feathers. Laine promised herself that, as soon as, she could, she would rid herself of this house, this bed, her clothes, her jewelry - everything but the flesh she lived in. She would scrub herself clean and flee to start a new life whose first and only commandment would be: Never let thyself be lied to again.
Stephen M. Irwin
It is then he realises that certain things loom larger than forgiveness and reconciliation: memory, for one, and history, bloody history.
Omar Musa
Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled people’s brains for some reason, that just amused them. Puns, and exaggerations, and things that were true and not at the same time.
Max Barry
Our own place is mall perhaps, but when your old man is eaten by his own shadow, you realise that maybe in every house, something so savage and sad and brilliant is standing up, without the world even seeing it.Maybe that's what these pages of words are about:Bringing the world to the window.
Markus Zusak
Such fascinating things, libraries. She closes her eyes. She couldwalk inside and step into a murder, a love story, a complete accountof somebody else’s life, or mutiny on the high seas. Such potential;such adventure—there’s a shimmer of malfeasance in trying otherways of being.
Ashley Hay
Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. I could have been wrong, but I was right.' If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it.I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind. I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people's sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking around in Beatrix Potter's garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified barriers on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become.She says suddenly, 'I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can't see them so well now.' She holds out her hands. The soft parts of her palms are crazed with definite white scares, each about a centimeter long.The first fence was wire mesh with a roll of barbed wire along the top.
Anna Funder
The cost of electrons and photons is getting cheaper all the time!
T. Gilling
Never forget,' says Sugar Daddy, 'we are a nation built on sugar. It is our history and it is the source of our prosperity, now and in the future.'This is true. Our entire nation sits on reclaimed land made from sugar. Ours is an island that rose out of the sea, built on a hard core of toffee.
Julie Koh
You may not have a clue of what lies ahead, but it’s better to act on life than simply let life act on you.
Nick Vujicic
Writing and drawing are very therapeutic, but they are also an excellent manifestation tool. I teach my clients to draw what they want, or to write a story about it to bring the manifestation forward into the present.
Alice McCall
She wasn't kind of lady that depended on a man and I think that's what made her so irrestible to them, any man she had loved she wanted ~ and the men that loved her back couldn't handle not being needed, so she showed them the door and grew her own wings as they walked out. Love to her isn't a maybe thing, nor is it attachment and any man whom thinks he will ever own her would be best not to try at all.
Nikki Rowe
The universe whispered it's him, but I sent you away ~ I tested our connection and left it to fate, Years have passed and others have come into our lives, but here we are again, meeting another time.Our timing is off, so we set our connection free once again, trusting the winds of fate and the synchronicity it sends.
Nikki Rowe
Our eyes met and our souls caught on fire.
Nikki Rowe
I crave intimate love. Words that make my soul dance, a touch that gives me goosebumps, eye contact that electrifies my entire body, a kiss that could have me questioning whose air I am breathing.
Nikki Rowe
The true Epicurean cultivates the capacity to take pleasure in simple things, while those around him chase pleasure in more things.
Luke Slattery
There has to be at least one other reason besides money that makes you do the things that you do.
S.A. Tawks
Grounding is most effective when you have some place to go. When you know where you are going, grounding brings strength and confidence, when you’re stagnant you get caught in the past.
Tony Curl
It’s sad to see how many relationships start as just a distraction from boredom, a cover up so they don’t have to ever deal with the true pain below
Evan Sutter
Don't let society fool you into believing that if you don't have a girlfriend or boyfriend then you're destined for a life of misery. The Dalai Lama has been single for the last 80 years and he is one of the happiest people on earth. Stop searching for happiness in places outside of yourself, and start finding it where it has always been: within you.
Miya Yamanouchi
No, what Great Aunt Winifred was suffering from was the persecution every happily single woman suffers: the predictable social condemnation of her independence and childlessness. Dorothy reminded herself of what she'd learned during a university course on feminist history (with a strong Marxist slant): spinsters are a threat to patriarchy.
Tobsha Learner
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