Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 32

Note that acceptance is different from approval. Acceptance is simply saying, “It is so.
Margie Warrell
Shuki’s wisdom: "Sometimes things happen, and the only choice you have is to accept it, and learn to make a life anyway.
M.A. McRae
Many rulers would have spent the morning complaining loudly about the cold and the discomfort, as if their complaints would actually serve to alleviate the situation and as if their attendants should be able to do something about it. Not the emperor. He accepted the situation knowing that he could do nothing to change the weather. Best to endure it without making life more difficult for those around him.
John Flanagan
It takes courage to say goodbye. To stare at a thing lost and know it is gone forever. Some tears are iron forged.
Jay Kristoff
What made her most beautiful, was the way she quietly touched those around her unknowingly changing the lives of the many, she smiled at. She didn't want praise; approval or admiration, she just wanted all of whom she loved to be the most authentic side of themselves & openly living to the means of their hearts & truth.
Nikki Rowe
It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip off down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship. It was almost embarrassing to be truly intimate with your spouse; because how could you watch someone floss one minute, and the next minute share your deepest passion or tritest of fears? It was almost easier to talk about that sort of thing before you’d shared a bathroom and a bank account and argued over the packing of the dishwasher.
Liane Moriarty
When a man's pride is injured, death is a small price to repay the insult.
James Clavell
We used to languish when we walked, or sidle down the street like dogs that have just done something wrong. Now Rube walks upright, because he's on the attack.
Markus Zusak
And I feel like a real Dad when I read to her at night. She won't sleep without one story, at least.
Steven Herrick
Stories change us. They change the world. People are stories of themselves.
Karen Healey
Legends of the Silver Stallion had been told for years now, whenever mountain stockmen met round the campfires or on the winding hill tracks. Songs were sung about him to the cattle and both songs and tales had become even stranger since his supposed death when he vanished through the wind and the night over a great cliff. Tales kept cropping up of a ghost horse seen, or imagined, roaming over the mountains at night, of stockmen waking in a hut at midnight, hearing the tremendous stallion’s cry which could only be Thowra’s
Elyne Mitchell
Your audience is your adversary. If you don't have one get one - imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination. You can't tell your story effectively and leave it out. It must be alive in you, vividly alive. It is in conflict with everything that is false in what you have written. If it is an audience worthy of your talent and potential, it won't let you slide by the lies, the laziness, the shortcuts. If you don't take audience seriously, you can be sure it will return the favor.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
Behind every drama is a good story...behind every tear is the person who wrote it.
Faye Hall
Some writers might tell you that writing is like a piece of magic - a process of creating something out of nothing, and I guess I used to think about it that way too a long long time ago. But as I've lived my life and loved and lost friends and family, and seen dreams smashed and resurrected, and marveled at the pettiness, drear ambition and ignorance of the herd of which I am a part, I can no longer say that a poem or a story or a script comes from nothing. If it's any good, if it has any power, any potent emotional body, then it's something that a writer has paid for, not only in time, but in all the anxiety that accompanies living and those small fret-filled acts of becoming present that make it possible for us to see beyond our little patch of immediacy. It's not just a reaching out, but a reaching in, into the depths of our being from whence we've sprung.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
Mowaljarlai rarely answered questions with an abstract explanation; he always told a story. His was not a fragmented world, divided into the convenient disciplinary languages and jargon that seem to be required for the understanding of concepts and principles in, for example, mathematics, physics, art and literature. Not only did he not have these languages; he thought this was a strange way to arrive at understanding the way in which the world lives in itself. It baffled him that whitefellas developed their knowledge by busting things up, reducing things to little pieces separate from everything else that contributes to their nature. For him, everything in creation is not only living and interconnected, but exists in a story and story cycle. Yet his knowledge of what whitefellas call ‘science’ was extraordinary.”p80-1.
Hannah Rachel Bell
Seals do not sit about and tell, the way people do, and their lives are not eventful in the way people's are, lines of story combed again and again, in the hope that they will yield more sense with every stroke.
Margo Lanagan
The story writes you as much as you write it. And the process of re-writing isn't so much a quest to re-write the story as it is to re-write the writer.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
As I prefer to see it, there has never been an epic love story that involved significant amounts of self-control.
Jennifer Harrison
As a screenwriter - if you are completely honest with yourself - you can’t help but admit that your greatest threat is the audience, where audience is not understood as a demographic category but as a character outside the script to whom the story is addressed. A good part of the drama necessary for uncovering the story resides in the conflict between the storyteller and his/her audience. Audience plays the part of antagonist to the writer’s role as protagonist. The writer drives the action, which is forever complicated, frustrated and undermined by the audience’s needs and sensibilities. Audience wants you to prove it. Audience has a chip on its shoulder, and doesn’t give a damn. Audience has been there and done that in the guise of your mother, your father, your ex-, your worst enemy. Audience laughs at your stupidity and dares you to change its view of you and the story world that you would have it care about. Audience is defiant. It has your number. The only way you can defeat it is by carrying a bigger stick - your only defence is an inspired offence, namely the story.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
Who lives inside your head? The hero of your story OR The victim of someone else's?
Tony Curl
Too many film schools, as well as any number of screenwriting gurus and an obscene number of how-to-write tomes, have made a business of catering to fledgling screenwriters and filmmakers by exploiting their belief that the only thing standing between them and an Oscar is the right kind of knowledge. If only one knew enough, one could easily become rich and famous. Unfortunately, almost all are susceptible to that eternal malady – “that last great infirmity of the soul” – which is FAME. And whilst I don’t deny the value of technical knowledge, such knowledge matters very little if the story one is trying to tell doesn’t matter, either because it’s incoherent or simply because it fails to make us care.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
This was the power of the story weaver, Nell realized. An ability to conjure color so that all else seemed to fade.
Kate Morton
Winter passed, and the world around began to wake. The birds returned to the kingdom and set about readying their nests, deer could be seen once more grazing where the fields met the woods, and buds burst forth upon the branches of the kingdom's trees.
Kate Morton
There was much work to be done in the crone's cottage, but the Princess was never heard to complain, for she was a true Princess with a pure heart. The happiest folk are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe. Thus did the Princess grow up contented. She came to love the changing seasons and learned the satisfaction of sowing seeds and tending crops. And although she was becoming beautiful, the Princess did not know it, for the crone had neither looking glass nor vanity and thus the Princess had not learned the ways of either.
Kate Morton
She didn't see him watching as he played, having no idea that Hans Hubermann's accordion was a story. In the times ahead, that story would arrive at 33 Himmel Street in the early hours of morning, wearing ruffled shoulders and a shivering jacket. It would carry a suitcase, a book, and two questions. A story. Story after story. Story within story.
Markus Zusak
There were thousands of households throughout that city and there was something happening in all of them. There was some kind of story in each, but self-contained. No one else knew. No one else cared.
Markus Zusak
I don't really know that this story has a whole lot of things happen in it. It doesn't really. It's just a record of how things were in my life during this last winter. I guess things happened, but nothing out of the ordinary.
Markus Zusak
When life is good do not take it for granted as it will pass. Be mindful, be compassionate and nurture the circumstances that find you in this good time so it will last longer. When life falls apart always remember that this too will pass. Life will have its unexpected turns.
Ajahn Brahm
First, people were not thinking about what they were doing 47 per cent of the time. Second, people were unhappier when their minds were wandering than they were not. And third, what people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness than what they were doing.
David Michie
What is it you really want? Are you really going to be happy when you get the object? What will it bring you? Is what you’re telling yourself really true? You have the choice, you can keep on getting hit by the wave or you can get the courage to run towards it and dive right through it - everything starts with you.
Evan Sutter
This inability to just do nothing is a direct result of our habit of externalisation. As children we are never taught in schools, or in social settings, to look within ourselves for answers. Whether it is that our answers are found in some sort of religion, or another person, or in something else, we start to make this common practice. We are indecisive in life looking to friends, family, counsellors, teachers, and even strangers for advice. We are never taught or, better yet, shown how to look after our number one relationship in life, which is the relationship with one’s self.
Evan Sutter
The worlds high on doing and distracting and as result we need to keep doing and it doesn’t really matter what we are doing, as long as it is distracting.
Evan Sutter
We become more devoted to pleasing other people than establishing a relationship with ourselves. We believe we are what we have and what we do and we believe we are what other people think we are. Ego is in many ways the primary cause of most of our misconception and woe.
Evan Sutter
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
The birds of anonymity fly high above in our shared sky. Witness their beauty.
Truth Devour
Men? They are simple creatures. Is there something wrong with your man? Feed him, and take him to your bed. Et Voila! All problems, they disappear. But if something is wrong with the woman? Je suis désolé. Women need to talk.– André Chevalier
Nikki Sex
This culture of distraction was nothing new. Christianity was born into one.
Mark Sayers
If her mother had been observing this interaction, she'd tell Clementine she was wrong, that she needed to keep talking, to say everything that was on her mind, to communicate, to leave no possibility for misinterpretation.If her father were here, he'd put his finger to his lips and say, "Shh."Clementine settled for two words."I'm sorry," she said.
Liane Moriarty
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
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
The first revolution is to transform the status of evaluation from untouchable to respectable , i.e., from the days a century ago when the value-free doctrine held that there could be no place for the serious treatment of evaluation within the sciences (or in the company of other respectable disciplines like history, jurisprudence, mathematics, etc.) to the days when even the National Academy of Sciences is doing evaluations at the request of Congress without protest from leading scientific and other professional organizations, and everyone will have good reasons for this acceptance.
Michael Scriven
Shifts within friendships happen in imperceptible increments. There is distance, then assurance. Misconjecture, caution, gradual convergence. So much depends on the respect accorded to vulnerability.
Gail Jones
...if you give respect, yet get respect back. If you offend, you get...retribution.
Juliet Marillier
Come closer, Kurokuma. It's quite safe.'Horace shuffled closer to the edge...'Quite safe, my foot,' he muttered to himself. 'And what's this Kurokuma you keep calling me?''It's a term of great respect,' Shigeru told him.'Great respect,' Shukin echoed.
John Flanagan
What was that, Kurokuma?' asked one of the escorts riding near him. The others chuckled at the name.'Nothing important,' Horace said. Then he looked at them suspiciously. 'What's this Kurokuma business?'The Senshi looked at him with a completely staight face.'It's a term of great respect,' he said. Several others within earshot nodded confirmation. They too managed to remain straight-faced. It was a skill the Nihon-Jan had perfected.'Great respect,' one of them echoed.
John Flanagan
Mama says that satisfaction isn't what I should search for. Respect is. Respect?I detest that word. Probably because in this world you have to respect the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
Melina Marchetta
What I do . . . the path I tread . . . it brings some choices that test me hard.
Juliet Marillier
Choose to be the best version of you.
Truth Devour
There is wisdom in knowing your limits and then daring to push past them. Choose to live an exceptional life.
Truth Devour
In this life I choose you.
Truth Devour
Freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want. Freedom is the strength of character to do what is good, true, noble, and right.
Matthew Kelly
Neil said to me once that in times of desperation, you have to force yourself to make a decision.It's your choice, he said. Us or them. So choose.
Shirley Marr
When we say ‘Yes’ to something we are always saying‘No’ to something else. So in that way, we never ‘don’t do’ anything. We are just doing something else.
Malti Bhojwani
You cannot simultaneously want to eat a chocolate cake every day in front of the TV and want to be slim. You cannot want to be single and carefree and want to be in a loving, exclusive relationship
Malti Bhojwani
Unless the consequence is ‘death by firing squad’ in my opinion, you do have a choice, and when you choose to do something as opposed to have to do it, you feel so much more motivated and inspired to do it.
Malti Bhojwani
The way you choose to think and speak about yourself (to yourself and others), IS A CHOICE! You may have spent your whole life talking about yourself in a negative way, but that doesn't mean you have to continue that path.
Miya Yamanouchi
But free will is what it means to be human, and no one can determine the path you take through this universe. Choice is our greatest right, our greatest gift-and our greatest responsibility.
Amie Kaufman
It is a choice, and therefore within the province of economics.
Jason Potts
But look behind you, Mary.' She nodded towards the dais. 'One of the musicians seems to be trying to attract your attention.'It was Peter. He was standing on the dais smiling across at me. My delight at seeing him was such that I could not disguise it - did not try to disguise it.
Jennifer Paynter
I had no idea how free we were. That's how free I was.
Brendan Cowell