Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 48

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre
Robert Hughes
Does any man have the right to dispose of his own life? This is the ultimate question of moral entitlement, and relevant only if right is relevant in this context, and it is not. A suicidal man cannot be concerned - and nor should he be - with questions of moral entitlement. (And how absurd.) His one concern should be whether self-execution will most expediently relieve his suffering.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
I think it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering.
Gregory David Roberts
We didn't let them do anything to us, Travanion," Beatriss said fiercely, "They did it without out permission.
Melina Marchetta
I remember thinking about how mothers were prepared to run into burning buildings to save their children's lives. I thought I should be able to go through a bit more suffering, a bit more inconvenience to give my children life. It made me feel noble. But now I realize I'm a crazy woman running into a burning house for children who don't exist.
Liane Moriarty
Attachment strangles freedom and clarity and makes us a puppet to our desires and cravings; attachment is the root of suffering, a root that if left unattended grows into a tree which drops the fruits of anger, greed, envy, dispersion, competitiveness, ego and pain
Evan Sutter
But this was different, as if some creature had risen from a corner of my cell and taken over every part of me. It swallowed meaning. I hadn't thought suffering would be like this, so ordinary, so dull, and so endless.
Robyn Cadwallader
The capacity for suffering – or more strictly, for suffering and/or enjoyment or happiness – is not just another characteristic like the capacity for language or for higher mathematics. Bentham is not saying that those who try to mark ‘the insuperable line’ that determines whether the interests of a being should be considered happen to have selected the wrong characteristic. The capacity for suffering and enjoying things is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in any meaningful way. It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a child. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being tormented, because mice will suffer if they are treated in this way.
Peter Singer
Fact One: Races are won or lost in key moments. Fact Two: Success in the sport is, above all else, about enduring suffering.
Chris McCormack
It would then be brought abruptly to an end, for the brightness had shown suffering the way.
Markus Zusak
The point is, Ilsa Hermann had decided to make suffering her triumph. When it refused to let go of her, she succumbed to it. She embraced it.
Markus Zusak
Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.
Anna Funder
He walks through the house of his past, hoping he'll find the right door, hoping he'll find the key.
Steven Herrick
For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.
Anna Funder
What drew him back was something altogether more personal, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing on the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone that he knew would never appear. He had long understood that one of his selves, the earliest and most vulnerable, had never left this place, and this original and clearest view of things could be recovered only through what had first come to him in the glow of its ordinary light and weather...it was the light they appeared in that was the point, and that at least had not changed.
David Malouf
...the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.
Tim Winton
I felt like I was living two lives. One in the present and one in the past.
A.B. Shepherd
Look, you can't change your past, Ditty, but you've still got your future.
Robyn Bavati
It's a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past, should exist only in memories glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photography forces us to see people before their future weighed down on them. Before they knew their endings.
Kate Morton
As seductive as it might have been to erase the grief and pain of the last ten years, it was also a lie. Young Alice was a fool. A sweet, innocent fool. Young Alice hadn't experienced ten years of living.
Liane Moriarty
Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.
J.M. Coetzee
I don’t enjoy surprises that compel me to renegotiate my relationship with the past.
Adib Khan
Stop trying to be a magician. The past won’t come back. It likes its safety in memory.
Adib Khan
Living your life through negative feelings and memories is doing yourself a dishonour.If you want to change you need to be willing to leave your past wounds behind you. -If you wish to remain stuck in your attachment to past pains then dare to ask yourself exactly why you feel the need to define yourself by your past traumas or tragedies.
Miya Yamanouchi
You are NOT an abuse survivor or victim. Leave your labels elsewhere because they are no longer serving you.
Miya Yamanouchi
It's hard getting momentum riding a bike up hill... It's hard getting momentum when you're dragging around all the pain from your past.
Tony Curl
There’s something in my voice that brings him back to me, overrides his buzz. ‘Gaby’—all traces of playfulness have gone—‘if anything ever happens to me, you’ll be fine. You’re strong enough to look after yourself. I hate to admit it, but you don’t need me. Never did.’ A smile. ‘But listen, nothing is going to happen today. It’s all good.’‘Jude, we’re high enough up to get a nose bleed.’‘So come with me.’I blink. ‘Fuck off.’‘I mean it. We can do this together.’ He raises his eyebrows at the girl who checked his harness. She nods.I risk looking over the side. There’s a river far beneath us. So far down we can’t hear it. My entire body goes numb.‘You’ve got about thirty seconds and then I’m going on my own.’What a choice: watch my brother jump out of this car or put aside my own fear and go with him. Share the recklessness. Why didn’t we go to Paris? We’d be arguing over where to buy cheese right now.Adrenaline begins to burn through me. ‘Screw it.’Jude breaks into a wide smile. ‘Seriously?’I glance at the yawning space beneath us. ‘Hurry up before I change my mind.
Paula Weston
Who would awaken the past? It shines like a sunriseAnd cuts like a fine blade.
Juliet Marillier
The past is truly an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present.
Steve Toltz
To positively discriminate in favour of groups that have been negatively discriminated against in the past.
Ben Elton
You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.
Geraldine Brooks
You're not as invisible as you think.
C.J. Duggan
The perfect body protects its owner from disease, gives birth to amazing new people and stops your bones from falling out. The end.
Heather Hill
Learn to love and value yourself, regardless of the affections of others. Romantic love then becomes a wonderful bonus, rather than a necessity.
Joanne Madeline Moore
Make your inner foundations strong and secure and then you can enjoy your partner, rather than feeling you must own them.
Joanne Madeline Moore
Learn to love yourself for who you are, not just what you do - there is a big difference.
Joanne Madeline Moore
With strong self-esteem you can climb any mountain and weather any storm.
Joanne Madeline Moore
Yes, you ARE important enough; and yes, your needs and wants DO matter.
Miya Yamanouchi
Remember that this is YOUR LIFE, and nothing is more important than YOU.
Miya Yamanouchi
Practise really seeing yourself in the mirror. This is NOT about examining yourself. This is about you looking beyond your external image to connect with your soul. Look upon yourself with complete appreciation and acceptance. You are so beautiful.
Miya Yamanouchi
The diet industry is making a lot of money selling us fad diets, nonfat foods full of chemicals, gym memberships, and pills while we lose a piece of our self-esteem every time we fail another diet or neglect to use the gym membership we could barely afford.
Portia de Rossi
Arts degrees are awesome. And they help you find meaning where there is none. And let me assure you, there is none. Don’t go looking for it. Searching for meaning is like searching for a rhyme scheme in a cookbook: you won’t find it and you’ll bugger up your soufflé.
Tim Minchin
In the absence of a story or foundation that gives hope or meaning, life has become a never-ending quest for pleasure and experience. Instead of being good, people want to feel good.
Mark Sayers
Were all trying to find meaning to make sense of our realities; in search of happiness within, Without realising our happiness within; is the only reality that gives life a meaning.
Nikki Rowe
To say that life is meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact
Peter Singer
There's no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.
Max Barry
There is no growth without risk. There is always something to be gained from any experience. It is up to us to interpret our truth of self.
Truth Devour
It's okay. We're all messed up in our own special way.
Allison Rushby
You are never alone as long as you are in the company of your precious self.
Miya Yamanouchi
If you have control over yourself, you have no desire to control others.
Miya Yamanouchi
Is it possible to cause so much misery to another human being, simply by being oneself? she wondered, feeling a reflection of that misery. No help for it; she must continue to be herself.
Amy Witting
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
What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.
David Malouf
My mother always told meNo monster lived beneath my bed,But she had failed to warn meIt laid on top of it instead.
Erin Hanson
Entrust your dreams and goals to people who will cheer you on and inspire you, who will tell you what you need to hear rather than what you want to hear so you can move forward and fast track.
Rachael Bermingham
If others benefit through you getting what you desire most,it will have a positive impact on the world and only then will every atom of your being work with the universe to help it come into fruition.
Malti Bhojwani
Keep going. You're a mess and you're happy.
Markus Zusak
When will you open your eyes to the possibility of the world?
Tony Curl
What in your life needs to be consigned to the bin? Just make sure it's not your dreams!
Tony Curl
How many good ideas have you let go because you didn't believe in yourself? You have to believe to achieve!
Tony Curl