Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 39

We are wolves, which are wild dogs, and this is our place in the city. We are small and our house is small on our small urban street. We can see the city and the train line and it's beautiful in its own dangerous way. Dangerous because it's shared and taken and fought for.That's the best way I can put it, and thinking about it, when I walk past the tiny houses on our street, I wonder about the stories inside them. I wonder hard, because houses must have walls and rooftops for a reason. My only query is the windows. Why do they have windows? Is it to let a glimpse of the world in? Or for us to see out?
Markus Zusak
There was an itchy lung for a last cigarette and an immense, magnetic pull toward the basement, for the girl who was his daughter and was writing a book down there he hoped to read one day. Liesel. His soul whispered it as I carried him. But there was no Liesel in that house. Not for me, anyway.
Markus Zusak
I wrenched open the windows. I stood while the cold air poured around my face like dark water, as if I was a rock and it was chiselling me into a new shape.
Sue Woolfe
He's my father!" she bellowed, pointing to Trevanion."Vestie!" Beatriss said firmly, stopping to stare up at her. "I'll snip at the tongue if I ever see it in such a way again! Trevanion, speak to her."Vestie hung her head, shamefaced."Vestie," he said, his voice still gentle."Yes, Father.""Shout it out louder, my love. Shout it out louder.
Melina Marchetta
She is like a butterfly, Beautiful to look at But hard to catch.
Nikki Rowe
For reasons he couldn’t understand a sadness came over him and it was then he saw the girl standing on the other side of the dirt road, her eyes pools of absolute sorrow, her light brown hair glowing in the splinters of sunlight that forced their way through the trees.
Melina Marchetta
Even though Xavier was only human, it seemed he could protect me from anything and everything. I wouldn't have been worried if a fire-breathing dragon had torn of the roof, because I knew that Xavier was there. I wondered fleetingly if I was expecting to much og him, but dismissed the idea.
Alexandra Adornetto
When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,' Miriam says.
Anna Funder
You are human, you will make mistakes, and it’s one of the most beautiful things about being human, but you must learn from your mistakes, otherwise your life will have a lot of unnecessary pain.
Rhonda Byrne
I think acting is revealing to people what it means to be human.
Nick Enright
If a human being is to ascend to the heights of life, they must first know who they are, where they currently stand, and what they are actually (in truth, not in their limited idea) capable of doing, becoming, and achieving in the world.
Emily Gowor
Our raw imperfections make us real and make us human but they don't make us.
Jay McLean
One day,” he said, “everybody’s gonna wake up and realize their parents are human beings, just like them. Sometimes they’re good people, sometimes they’re not.
Krystal Sutherland
So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am.
John Marsden
That was when the world wasn't so big and I could see everywhere. It was when my father was a hero and not a human.
Markus Zusak
I couldn't tell what colour her eyes were. They were wet and dark and shining, like pools of deep, still water. For a second I thought I could see pictures in them, like I was looking right inside her to where her memories were. She smiled, and I wondered if she knew what I'd seen or if she could see the pictures I kept hidden inside myself.
Glenda Millard
Sometimes it's more painful to draw to mind the good times
Amy Molloy
Gritting my teeth as if it requires actual physical strength, I push the memory of him dying in my arms down, deep down. It almost seems to fight me, to want to surge into the forefront of my mind, and I sigh. Long ago I came to the realization that painful memories are persistent. The agony of them stays with you much longer, sharper, and clearer than sweet memories, that soften and assume a hazy, rosy glow in your mind, almost as if they have been airbrushed. Remembrance of pain is different; there is no muting of colors, no blurring of edges. No, its colors remain stark and bold, a palette of vibrant primary reds, blues, and yellows; its edges stay defined and razor sharp. Years later it can still cut you as deeply, make you bleed as profusely, as the day it was formed. FROM AN UNTITLED WORK IN PROGRRESS
Lily Velden
I dug out an old brown suitcase and threw a few clothes into it, then looked around my bedroom for memorabilia, but stopped when I remembered that the purpose of memorabilia is to trigger memory. I didn't want to be lugging my memories all over the place. They were to heavy.
Steve Toltz
Even post true death memories carried on the waves of universal energy will defy the faux perception of finality.
Truth Devour
You can spend a lifetime trying to erase memories. It doesn't change the fact that they took place. Acceptance is the key.
Truth Devour
Is that the secret meaning of the word story, do you think: a storing place of memories?
J.M. Coetzee
The day might come when I had nothing but memories, and the choice of whether to indulge my romantic side and wallow in them, or my cynical side and reflect on the reliability.
Graeme Simsion
I had forgotten, I suppose, that there were bright memories in amongst the dark.
Kate Morton
As if I hadn't spent a lifetime pretending to forget.
Kate Morton
So, we skipped Annabel, and discussed condoms. I said I liked the orange ones, and we ended our talk in laughter.
Steven Herrick
and I'm thinking as our bodies meet that I'll remember this forever, and i just hope it's for all the right reasons.
Steven Herrick
Maybe memories should be left the way they are.
Melina Marchetta
A few people would suffer, but a lot of people would be better off.''It's just not right,' said Kevin stubbornly. 'Maybe not. But neither's your way of looking at it. There doesn't have to be a right side and a wrong side. both sides can be right, or both sides can be wrong...
John Marsden
But if you take pleasure in morality, then you are always in deficit.
Brian Castro
Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.
Peter Singer
The argument that personal moral views should not be imposed on others when it comes to lawmaking is incoherent and misleading. It is incoherent because a great deal of law implicitly "imposes" a particular moral view on the wider society. It would be disingenuous to pretend that the legalization of abortion on demand or euthanasia does not impose a certain moral view on the rest of society. This is especially true when arguments for abortion and euthanasia are based on rights. The appeal to rights is a moral argument, and it is this appeal to moral authority that gives force to laws enshrining rights.
George Cardinal Pell
How can a man be still if he sees such a great wrong being instigated?''It's difficult, but it's necessary,' Professor While insisted. 'Science must go on unhindered, and if we bring politics into our work we will cease to be scientists.''Will we cease being human?' MacGregor demanded with the rudeness of justifying himself. 'Should we hand over our affairs to men we despise?''I suppose that is unanswerable.' Professor White was an deep into it now as MacGregor. 'But when we dabble in politics we suffer what you are suffering now, and it isn't worth it. Is it?''I don't know,' MacGregor said morosely.'Then why destroy yourself?' 'I don't believe a man has much choice any more,' MacGregor said. 'There seems to be some kind of a battle going on for any existence, science and all.''You may be right,' the Professor said. 'We are certainly facing a situation of terrible choice. Only yesterday the physicist chaps back from America brought in a petition to sign against control and secrecy of information and research in nuclear physics. Once they start on this secrecy business there is no telling where it will end. It was bad enough when we were working at Tennessee. We cannot have those ignorant politicians telling us what we must do.''They are already telling us what we must do,' MacGregor argued. 'The military control so much research that the phyusicist are becoming straight-out weapon makers and nothing else.''It's not the physicists' fault...''Then why don't they stop working for the military. Now they are talking about radio-active dust clouds and the biologists are producing concentrates of bacteria for wholesale disease-making. What's the matter with them? Have the Generals got them so scared that they meekly do as they are told?''Weapons are a part of life,' the Professor commented sadly, 'and since the politicians refuse to be peaceful, at least they ask for weapons and give us a chance we would not otherwise have of making enormous strides in costly research.''Perhaps. But don't we care how the products of our research are used?''You are looking for logic where there isn't any,' the Professor said. 'It isn't science which shapes the world, young man.''No sir, but we are part of it.''Really a very small part of it. The ultimate decision on human affairs lies outside science. We may be part of it, but if you are looking for the deciding factor in the shape of existence then I don't know where you'll find it.
James Aldridge
Society will always do better where citizens have a belief in justice, honour and private morality. Where individuals are reduced to the satisfaction of personal appetites society will decline. The need to preserve society is at the very heart of conservatism and the absolute moral truths that are required for this preservation are not subject to change.
Cory Bernardi
And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature,art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass onthe hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent.
Greg Egan
On average, around 500,000 people die on the planet every year as a result of intentional violence and homicide. These acts span domestic violence, war, terrorism, infanticide, gang violence, honor killings and state executions. Many of these deaths pass relatively unnoticed while some attract attention.
Chris Rhyss Edwards
A world that denies – or worse, downplays - the existence of child soldiers, honor killing victims and parents forced to commit infanticide is a world in denial. Gross incidence such as these will only persist for as long as people choose to turn their faces away.
Chris Rhyss Edwards
[W]e must start from somewhere in current folk morality, otherwise we start from somewhere unintuitive, and that can hardly be a good place to start
Frank Jackson
And if you did this, if you saved your mother from this vicious killer, would you be doing the wrong thing or the right thing?""The right thing," I said just as swiftly."No, Lin, I'm afraid not," he frowned. "We have just seen that in the terms of this new, objective definition of good and evil, killing is always wrong because, if everyone did it, we would not move toward God, the ultimate complexity, with the rest of the universe. So it is wrong to kill. But your reasons were good. So therefore, the truth of this decision is that you did the wrong thing, for the right reasons ...
Gregory David Roberts
that great condenser of moral chaos, The City.
Robert Hughes
Endless days of dark indoors and hateful glances are enough to set a rime on anyone’s bones.
Hannah Kent
Withholding love is a bit like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
Matthew Kelly
I hate that the actions of a minority can influence the opinions of a majority.
Sarah Ayoub
You're everything I hate about the rock world and yet everything I love...
Lexxie Couper
I hated you,“ said Laurent. "I hated you so badly I thought I’d choke on it. If my uncle hadn’t stopped me, I would have killed you. And then you saved my life, and every time I needed you, you were there, and I hated you for that, too.
CS Pacat
His hatred for her was now as solid as the boards he lay on, as the stones ringing the firepit.
Stephen M. Irwin
In 2015, the writer Alex Blank Millard engaged in her own gender-swap experiment to highlight the misogynist nature of online abuse. Sick of constantly receiving rape threats from ‘faceless eggs’ online, she changed her Twitter profile photo to that of a white man – but kept the content she posted the same. When Millard tweeted about rape culture, fat shaming, and systemic oppression as Lady Alex, the standard response was a deluge of rape and death threats, and a bunch of guys calling her fat. When she commented on the same things as Straight- and Cis-Looking White Dude Alex, she was retweeted, favourited, and even cited by Buzzfeed (Millard, 2015).
Emma A. Jane
The thing is, I don't even hate cops. To tell you the truth, I actually feel a little sorry for them.
Markus Zusak
Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.
Gregory David Roberts
There is seldom any rational reason for having regreats about past deeds or events. Because the past does not exist in any other way than in your memory.When you recognise this lack of reality, you can be calm.
Paul Wilson
i go deeper into my head
Robert Adamson
It's good to keep changing your mind. It shows you're thinking. I'll only stop changing my mind when I'm dead. And maybe not even then.
John Marsden
Tall, elegant, vital, scornful. A man like that could rock a woman to her very core.
Margaret Way
You should know it yourself- a young man is still a boy, and a boy sometimes has the right to be stubborn.
Markus Zusak
If I become the man you want, I wouldn't be the man I am.
Michael Robotham
The greatest riddle of all.... the riddle of man! The complex mystery of the universal human being as he stands wihtin the threshold of universal laws. This is the most fascinating puzzle!
Adriana Koulias
She was so shattered about what kind of man he was -- brutal, tender, passionate. There was little doubt he had some mental disorder.
Margaret Way
If you ever look sideways at another man or attempt to refuse me I shall beat you. Got it?
Margaret Way
The truly unsettling thing about being a woman was needing a man to realise one's full potential
Margaret Way
Luke’s not a bad man, or even an unlikable one,” she went on. “Just a man. You’re all the same, great big hairy moths bashing yourselves to pieces after a silly flame behind a glass so clear your eyes don’t see it. And if you do manage to blunder your way inside the glass to fly into the flame, you fall down burned and dead.While all the time out there in the cool night there’s food, and love, and baby moths to get. But do you see it, do you want it? No! It’s back after the flame again, beating yourselves senseless until you burn yourselves dead!
Colleen McCullough