Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 3

Sometimes I wish I was a guy. Life’s so much easier for them.
Cath Crowley
It was not very long afterwards that Michael woke up one morning with a curious feeling inside him. He knew, the moment he opened his eyes, that something was wrong but he was not quite sure what it was. "What is today, Mary Poppins?" He enquired, pushing the bedclothes away from him. "Tuesday," said Mary Poppins. "Go and turn on your bath. Hurry!" she said, as he made no effort to move. He turned over and pulled the bedclothes up over his head and the curious feeling increased. "What did I say?" said Mary Poppins in that cold, clear voice that was always a Warning. Michael knew now what was happening to him. He knew he was going to be naughty.
P.L. Travers
See you in the fall.
Justine Larbalestier
It's a a damn good day to be alive.
Michael Clifford
Never allow anyone to define you! Just be you!
Chrys Phillips
The trail of lime trees outside our building is still a public loo. …where else are they supposed to go to the toilet in a city where public toilets are about as common as UFO sightings?” (pp.281-82)
Sarah Turnbull
Love and romance are things worth waiting for.
Cath Crowley
When it comes to generating writing material, teenagers are gold. Their world is a narcissistic, anarchic, paranoid hell of anxieties and stresses about how they look; how popular they are or aren’t; and how fast or slowly, big or small their private parts are growing. As an observer, it’s fantastic. Hilarious, at times. Poignant and heartbreaking. It is all the stuff of great human drama because, before your eyes, you get to witness character transformation. Boy grows into man. Girl grows into woman. Writers strain to make this shit up.But – and here’s the catch – we dare not discuss any of this if we want our kids to trust us or ever talk to us again. And that’s because, lifts and pocket money aside, teenagers crave privacy – the need for which hatches both swiftly and silently while we’re sorting out the laundry. It’s as if they suddenly wake up one day creeped out by the thought of all those years we wiped their butts and helped them put on their undies and they go into lock- down. They smoke us out, put up walls, close their doors, shut down their stories, and waft, earphoned, through our homes in a shroud of hormones and appetite. Their lives – in which, until recently, we participated with Too Much Information and gross oversharing – suddenly become ‘none of our business.
Joanne Fedler
You will need to stay calm as you witness the candy floss in your daughter’s smile harden into brittle bitchiness. You will need to muster a new resolve as your son’s fascination with Pokémon shifts to porn. You will have to recalibrate your mothering instinct to accommodate the notion that not only do your children poop and burp, they also masturbate, drink and smoke. As their bodies, brains and worlds rearrange themselves, you will need to do your own reshuffling. You will come to see that, though you gave them life, they’re the ones who’ve got a life. They’ve got 1700 friends on Facebook. They’ve got YouTube accounts (with hundreds of sub- scribers), endless social arrangements, concerts, Valentine’s Day dances and Halloween parties. What we have – if we’re lucky – is a ‘Thanks for the ride, Mum, don’t call me, I’ll call you,’ as they slam the car door and indicate we can run along now.
Joanne Fedler
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
Were you in love with Emma?" I ask."I was hard-core obsessed," he says without thinking about it. "Not in love." "What's the difference?"He's about to throw a stone at ta yard light but stops. "Prison," he says, and puts the stone in his pocket.
Cath Crowley
Opponents past and present have the same essential weakness about them: first they want to use you, then they want to be you, then they want to snuff you out.
Julian Assange
How’s work?’ Martin asked. Behrouz was now a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, which these days seemed to mean as much video journalism as prose. ‘Not bad.’ Behrouz smiled slightly. ‘Business people might be the last paying market left for real news. If they’re convinced that they’re getting fearlessly objective information, they’ll keep shelling out for it – while everyone else gives up caring and buries their head inside their favourite consensual reality.’ Martin laughed softly, self-conscious but grateful for a few words of real conversation, a lifeline out of the pit. ‘You’re not a fan of News Five Point Oh, then?’ ‘Don’t get me started. HigherTribe is worse, but they’re all pathological. What isn’t filtered and spun is just invented out of whole cloth.’ ‘Yeah.’ The replacement of journalism by rumour aggregators and group-think salons was a serious matter, but Martin’s enthusiasm for talking shop was already beginning to falter.
Greg Egan
Josie, life is not a Mills and Boon book. People fall out of love. People disappoint other people and they find it very hard to forgive.
Melina Marchetta
i loved him, every inch of his being, but i realised one day; if loving him meant losing me, than loving him was not enough anymore.
Nikki Rowe
It took a while for her to figure out she could run but when she did she was long gone, Long gone..
Keith Urban
She laid her heart and soul right in your handsAnd you stole her every dream and crushed her plansShe never even knew she had a choiceAnd that's what happens when the only voice she hears is telling her she can'tYou stupid boy
Keith Urban
..And now you've lost the only thing that ever made you feel alive
Keith Urban
As it 'appens, I am Arthur's right-hand man," said Suzy. "Or left-hand girl, I can't remember where I stood last time. Anyhow, me and Arthur is like two fingers of a gauntlet. Or at least the thumb and the little finger. I mean, I'm his top General, and all. So if I say you're in, you're in.
Garth Nix
Halt regarded him. He loved Horace like a younger brother. Even like a second son, after will. He admired his skill with a sword and his courage in battle. But sometimes, just sometimes, he felt an overwhelming desire to ram the young warrior's head against a convenient tree.
John Flanagan
And why would I be hiding from Master Chubb in his own kitchen?" Halt challenged. Again, Horace shrugged innocently. "Well, there was a tray of freshly made pies airing on the windowsill, wasn't there? And you're quite fond of pies, aren't you, Halt?" Halt drew himself up very straight in the saddle. "Are you accusing me of sneaking into that kitchen to steal the pies for myself? Is that it?" His voice and body language simply reeked of injured dignity."Of course not, Halt!" Horace hurried to assure him, and Halt's stiff-shouldered form relaxed a little."I just thought I'd give you the opportunity to confess," Horace added.
John Flanagan
I'd say," the Ranger answered after a few seconds' deliberation, "that he'll be heading south now that he has the chance. Back into Araluen.""How do you know that?" Horace asked. He was always impressed at the two Rangers' ability to read a situation and come up with the correct answer to a problem. Sometimes, he thought, they almost seemed to have divine guidance."I'm guessing," Halt told him.
John Flanagan
I'd sneer and tell him he's got the cerebral finesse of an amoeba and delight in his squint of confusion.
Craig Silvey
Good,’ he said. ‘Cause Maggie’s all the nightmare I can take.’I smiled. ‘Gus, I never knew you dreamed of me.’He gave me a one-fingered salute.
Jessica Shirvington
You're living your days at the moment how a sheep grazes, meandering, not engaged with anything much.
Nikki Gemmell
The end is never worth the beginning.
Vali Myers
I knew that the Name was still with him, animating his soul, even as his body failed.
Geraldine Brooks
Ten thousand men possess ten thousand hopes. A few bear fruit in happiness; the others go awry. But he who garners day by day the good life, he is happiest.
Gilbert Murray
A small fact:You are going to die....does this worry you?
Markus Zusak
Since Modi's Mumbai sign-off, much commentary has been focused on the brand-dilution potential inherent in its scandals. MS Dhoni doesn't think we should worry: 'IPL as a brand can survive on its own.' Shilpa Shetty, 'brand ambassador' of the Rajasthan Royals, tweets that we should: 'Custodians of Cricket must not hamper d Brandvalue of this viable sport.' Hampering d Brandvalue, insists new IPL boss Chirayu Amin, is the furthest thing from his mind: 'IPL's brand image is strong and nobody can touch that.' Harsha Bhogle, however, frets for the nation: 'Within the cricket world, Brand India will take a hit.'Not much more than a week after Modi's first tell-all tweets, the media was anxiously consulting Brand Finance's managing director, Unni Krishnan. Had there been any brand dilution yet? It was, said the soothsayer gravely, 'too early to say'. He could, however, confirm the following: 'The wealth that can be created by the brand is going to be substantially significant for many stakeholders. A conducive ecosystem has to be created to move the brand to the next level… We have to build the requisite bandwidth to monetise these opportunities.' Er, yeah… what he said. Anyway, placing a value on the IPL brand has clearly been quite beneficial to Brand Finance's brand.
Gideon Haigh
The assumption now is that the interests of the brand and of the game overlap to the degree that cricket need hardly be mentioned.
Gideon Haigh
Since inception, the IPL has worn its brand value like a corroboration of inner virtue. On the eve of this tournament, under the headline 'Brand IPL touches the sky', the league's website reverberated with the announcement that Brand Finance, a branding consultancy, had valued the brand value of the IPL brand at $4.13 billion worth of brand—which is a lot of brand, brand-wise.
Gideon Haigh
The lesson I learned is that when you give someone authority, you must be conscious you are doing so and continue to ask yourself whether it is in your best interests.
Margie Warrell
He was one of those characters who felt that a weak handshake could somehow damage his authority, which meant that every handshake had to bloody hurt.
Adrian McKinty
Behind every unquestionable belief is a system of control.
Graeme Rodaughan
We just didn't get it. We were weakened and exhilarated at the same time. A paranoiac's nightmare! A narcissist's dream! We didn't know how to feel: flattered or raped. Maybe both. We were puzzling at breakneck speed.
Steve Toltz
The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.
Kate Morton
You're incredible. I can feel your power and it's more than anything I...Violet," he swallowed, watching me in awe. "It's like...It's like you're as powerful as an angel."-Lincoln
Jessica Shirvington
Would you die for her?I do. Every Day.
Jessica Shirvington
The importance of "small wins"When we believe that we can win it's amazing how positive we can become.So, to make positive change, plan small wins along the way.
Tony Curl
Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves.
George Miller
You don't have to be naked to be sexy.
Nicole Kidman
In some ways, the great danger for this commodified universe is our boredom with it ... There is this sort of dialectic that you could tease out, that even in this overdeveloped late-capitalist world, that boredom was still this kind of critical energy that you could work on and try to theorize and then act on, to find other kinds of belonging, other kinds of desire, other kinds of life.
Kenneth McKenzie Wark
We make our decisions, and then our decisions turn around and make us.
F.W. Boreham
No literally the only thing that's stopping us from getting married is the fact that we haven't 'met yet
Troye Sivan
Together they listed the people they had known who had died on the mountains. A bleak conversation to have, thought Margrét, but there was some comfort in talking about death aloud, as though in naming things, you could prevent them from happening.
Hannah Kent
A final dirty joke.Another human punch line
Markus Zusak
In the quest for power, truth is always the first thing left behind.
Sonya Hartnett
The quest for power is strange in that, once the quest has begun, the destination always seems to shift ever further away. What power one has is never enough; whatever happiness one had turns to bitterness.
Sonya Hartnett
There is something cathartic about what has happened to me during this stay in hospital. I’ve heard others say that coming face to face with your own mortality can have this effect. You look with harsh, savage eyes at the life you are living and resolve to make the best of the time you have left, if you can be allowed the luxury of a few extra years to fulfill your plans. Around me, I see an urgency creep into the lives of friends once they have an AIDS diagnosis: they rush out and try to complete as many life projects as they can, before their health deteriorates.
David Menadue
I am ready for love, but I am not a seeker of it. My truth is; the more I love who I am, the more I will attract my perfect mirror of love to meet me halfway.
Nikki Rowe
But we have seen how brightly light shines in the dark, how sweetly music fills the quiet. All these years you have known only shadow and silence, and we have so much to show you. To sav
Amie Kaufman
The Angel of Death took the woman's frail hand. "Don't be afraid." she said. "Life is your past. Death, on the other hand, is your soul preparing for a new beginning. A brand new adventure, if you like." An excerpt from Paradox - Equilibrium. Book 4 in the Paradox series (release date 2013)
Patti Roberts
Life has its insidious way of crawling its way back into your sphere and you’re dumbed down again by so many distractions including work obligations, social niceties and mountains of clothes washing.
Josh Langley
That's what we think because we can't imagine what it's like to not exist.
Cath Crowley
It's everything and nothing ... It's like the absent moment between night and day.
Sophie Hardcastle
Understanding is the assassin of bigotry, and lays a strong foundation upon which to build a tolerant society.
Narissa Doumani
One should continue (of course with dignity) to develop, however old one may be. She had nothing against developing, against further ripeness, because as long as one was alive one was not dead -obviously, decided Mrs. Fisher, and development, change, ripening, were life.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Only because books are better than people, Father. ... Because they are masters who instruct without a rod. If you approach them, they are never asleep; if you are ignorant, they never laugh; if you make mistakes, they never chide. They give to all who ask of them, and never demand payment. ... All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, if God hadn't provided us with the remedy of books.
Catherine Jinks - Pagan's Scribe
A good book...leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.
Richard Flanagan