Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 35

The opening notes of a song began, some plucking of guitar strings. I knew the melody. It was Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved.” As pop songs went, it was pretty damn good, a bit of a favorite of mine.
Kylie Scott
After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding.Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page.But there was nothing - the final page had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding. There was no last page. The book of his life just broke off. There was only the mud below him and the filthy sky above. There was to be no peace and no hope. And Dorrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end.
Richard Flanagan
As the boat drew nearer to shore, and tiny dots in the distance became seagulls, she opened the book across her lap and gazed at the beautiful black-and-white sketch of a woman and a deer side by side in the clearing of a thorny forest. And somehow, though she could not read the words, the little girl realized the she knew this picture's tale. Of a young princess who traveled a great distance across the sea to find a precious, hidden item belonging to someone she dearly loved.
Kate Morton
She stood up and took the book from him, and as he smiled over his shoulder at some other kids, she threw it away and kicked him as hard as she could in the vicinity of the groin.Well, as you might imagine, Ludwig Schmeikl certainly buckled, and on the way down, he was punched in the ear. When he landed, he was set upon. When he was set upon, he was slapped and clawed and obliterated by a girl who was utterly consumed with rage. His skin was so warm and soft. Her knuckles and fingernails were so frighteningly tough, despite their smal
Markus Zusak
A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.
J.M. Coetzee
He took my hand, made me stand on the branch and asked, "What can you see from here?" "Nothing" I said,"Know what I can see? From this distance everything is so bloody perfect".
Melina Marchetta
I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. Please, trust me. I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's. Just don't ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.
Markus Zusak
Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you've finished just to stay near it.
Markus Zusak
Hair the color of lemons,'" Rudy read. His fingers touched the words. "You told him about me?"At first, Liesel could not talk. Perhaps it was the sudden bumpiness of love she felt for him. Or had she always loved him? It's likely. Restricted as she was from speaking, she wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to drag her hand across and pull her over. It didn't matter where. Her mouth, her neck, her cheek. Her skin was empty for it, waiting.Years ago, when they'd raced on a muddy field, Rudy was a hastily assembled set of bones, with a jagged, rocky smile. In the trees this afternoon, he was a giver of bread and teddy bears. He was a triple Hitler Youth athletics champion. He was her best friend. And he was a month from his death.Of course I told him about you," Liesel said.
Markus Zusak
As an anonymous wit is supposed to have put it: "Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.
David Christian
So long as we are driven by the need to make up for our needs; by the restless sense that we are not yet fully assured of our place in the world and our hold on its swarming phenomena; so long as there is more to be discovered and made, more to grasp for and make real, we must go on inventing ourselves.
David Malouf
The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.
Paul Davies
Cheats prosper until there are enough who bear grudges against them to make sure they do not prosper.
Peter Singer
It is not a matter of whether one is biased or not. It is really a question of which bias is the best bias with which to be biased.
Ken Ham
An all-out attack on evolutionist thinking is possibly the only real hope our nations have of rescuing themselves from an inevitable social and moral catastrophe.
Ken Ham
Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.
Michael Denton
In life I would much prefer to be sinned upon than the sinner. It is easier, vous comprenez? With the clear conscience one sleeps very well. The sinner may deny it… but in his heart he knows. He does not deserve to be happy.
Nikki Sex
Hesitating, I stood in the doorway to the room holding the proof of my sin.
A.B. Shepherd
There're three reasonspeople get away from here:gone good, gone bad orgone dead.
Emma Cameron
You can’t expect to conquer the world in one day, you know. All good things will come in time.
Peter Koevari
And I'd learned, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better.
Gregory David Roberts
Being a writer brings out a sassy woman inside me, and I love her so.
Anna Bayes
Keep your expectations high, Not because you are better than anyone else, but because you have experienced enough pain; to realise, you won't settle anymore.
Nikki Rowe
Some women become reckless with the fire, some find every way to put it out and rise above with the ashes left behind.
Nikki Rowe
I like being full of mystery and wonder, people always know im up to something but never know exactly what.
Nikki Rowe
I wanted to drown inside a woman in the feeling and drooling of the love I could give her. I wanted her pulse to crush me with its intensity. That's what I wanted. That's what I wanted myself to be.
Markus Zusak
Somehow, we have gotten off track from the basics of health and spirituality, and we get in our own way.
Alice McCall
I read once that you need two things to be happy. Any two of health, money and love. You can cover the absence of one with the other two. I drew comfort from this idea while I was fully bodied, employed, and unloved. It made me feel I wasn't missing much. But now I realized this was unmitigated bullshit, because health and money did not compare with love at all. I had a girl in a hospital bed who liked me and I didn't know where that might go but I could tell it was more important than low blood pressure. It mattered more than a new car. With Lola in the same building, I walked with a spring in my step. That was true literally. But I mean I was happy, happy on an axis I had previously known about only in theory. I was glad to be alive.
Max Barry
I read somewhere that the only difference between Illness and Wellness is the ‘I’ and the ‘We’, When you only think of yourself, ‘I’, you are victimizing yourself and you are blaming yourself and you are ‘feeding’ the illness, whereas when you look at yourself as a part of this Universe and you do your part in giving and contributing in whatever ways you know, you focus on the ‘We’ and you experience Wellness.
Malti Bhojwani
The modern fitness scene is largely defined by the presence of pumped up, muscle-bound bodybuilders, expensive exercise machines, and steroids.It's wasn't always this ways. There was a time when men trained to become inhumanly strong using nothing but their own bodyweight. No weights. No machines. No drugs. Nothing
Paul Wade
Motivation may be what starts you off, but it's habit that keeps you going back for more.
Miya Yamanouchi
I found focusing on the positives was really beneficial. I wrote down thoughts about how much better I would feel and look and how much calmer and more present I would be when I could get through the initial phase of wanting sugar and pop out the other side
Damon Gameau
People who work out are so gullible. They think they'll live longer. Well, good luck to them. It's a shame most of them aren't bright enough to realise that the extra time added to their life when they're eighty and too old to do anything productive with it is roughly equal to all the time wasted in the gym when they're young and capable of having fun.
Toni Jordan
The aim of the taper is to minimise accumulated fatigue and fill up the fuel stores to arrive at the start line fresh.
Dan Golding
Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener.
Thomas Keneally
There's no dignity, no decency, or health today for men that haven't got a job. All other things depend on work today.
Nevil Shute
And dieting, I discovered, was another form of disordered eating, just as anorexia and bulimia similarly disrupt the natural order of eating. "Ordered" eating is the practice of eating when you are hungry and ceasing to eat when your brain sends the signal that your stomach is full. ... All people who live their lives on a diet are suffering. If you can accept your natural body weight and not force it to beneath your body's natural, healthy weight, then you can live your life free of dieting, of restriction, of feeling guilty every time you eat a slice of your kid's birthday cake.
Portia de Rossi
justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.
Gregory David Roberts
I have lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms. Of all the people of this town I am the one least fitted to write a memorial. Better the blacksmith with his cries of rage and woe.
J.M. Coetzee
One of the best ways to achieve justice is to expose injustice.
Julian Assange
Justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them
Gregory David Roberts
The practice of deception is foolishness because the truth always eventually surfaces.
Hayley Solich
The reason is that as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, in this time, it is not. It is my bussines, mine alone.'This place being what?''This place being South Africa
J.M. Coetzee
Just be, right now, here; & breathe. Stop questioning every little thing, stop analysing how it should be and let go of the control, you hold so tightly onto; and beging to trust the magic of yourself.
Nikki Rowe
People value people who value people.
Tony Curl
Atheism certainly promotes a low view of humanity- how much lower can you get than thinking yourself an accidental by-product of a series of even larger accidents!
John Dickson
I've spent a life-time attacking religious beliefs and have not wavered from a view of the universe that many would regard as bleak. Namely, that it is a meaningless place devoid of deity.However I'm unwilling simply to repeat the old arguments of the past when, in fact, God is a moving target and is taking all sorts of new shapes and forms. The arguments used against the long bow are not particularly useful when debating nuclear weapons, and the simple arguments against the old model gods are not sufficient when dealing with the likes of Davies et al.For example, the notion that God didn't exist, doesn't exist but may come into existence through the spread of consciousness throughout the universe is too clever to be pooh-poohed along Bertrand Russell lines. And if I had the time I could give you half a dozen other scientific theologies that will need snappier footwork from the atheist of the future.
Phillip Adams
The traditional arguments for the existence of God have been fairly thoroughly criticised by philosophers. But the theologian can, if he wishes, accept this criticism. He can admit that no rational proof of God's existence is possible. And he can still retain all that is essential to his position, by holding that God's existence is known in some other, non-rational way. I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be made by way of the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another, so that the theologian can maintain his position as a whole only by a much more extreme rejection of reason than in the former case. He must now be prepared to believe, not merely what cannot be proved, but what can be disproved from other beliefs that he also holds.
John Leslie Mackie
I'm not religious, and I'm not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a God. It's kind of defending the indefensible, though; I'm critical of what religions are becoming, the more destructive they're becoming. But I think as an artist, particularly, it's a necessary part of what I do, that there is some divine element going on within my songs.
Nick Cave
I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger.
Helen Garner
There are pieces of me on the ground.
Markus Zusak
The actions and emotional responses of others are not your responsibility. You cannot rescue people from themselves. This is for them to do. — André Chevalier
Nikki Sex
When the madness came, he would be like a man staggering along the rim of the abyss – which was his rage – and when the edge gave way or he missed his step, he might clutch at anyone within reach and drag that person with him over the precipice.
Geraldine Brooks
She was feeling something: a tiny pinpoint of feeling. She shifted slightly on the bathroom tiles. No. Surely not. From a book?
Lianne Moriarty
Intensity of connection,Depth of emotion,Unified thoughts,No doubts in the significance of you.
Truth Devour
There’s something about human nature which draws us to people who are authentic and makes us want to repel those that aren’t.
Rachael Bermingham
While it is absurd to blame Marx for something he did not foresee and certainly would have condemned if he had foreseen it, the distanced between Marx's predicted communist society and the form taken by 'communism' in the twentieth century may in the end be traceable to Marx's misconception of the flexibility of human nature.
Peter Singer
sometimes the human race likes to crank things up a little. They increase the production of bodies and their escaping souls.
Markus Zusak
I suspect each of us uses the past to prop up the bruised present. It’s a clumsy try for the comfort of normality.
Adib Khan
If manifestations of her love are overwhelming and sometimes seem imprudent, it’s because the intensity of such caring doesn’t exist in other areas of life. Ma does not love from behind a protective shield. I’m incapable of opening up to people in the way she does. Ma isn’t afraid of being vulnerable and doesn’t measure relationships in terms of what she can gain. If her feelings are hurt, she doesn’t hide the pain or seek revenge. She stumbles over the setback as though it’s one of life’s quirky tests of fortitude and moves on without storing any resentment.
Adib Khan