Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 57

Like young fern shootsmy child's fingers curled.I did not expect,in the fifth month, frost.
Lian Hearn
And it didn't matter. It wouldn't make a fucking difference if I dropped to the floor and started crying like a baby. No point in panicking. No point in breaking. No point in anything at all.
Lisa Henry
The boy in the tree sobs uncontrollably when I tell him about the Hermit and my mother, yet his eyes light up each time I mention Hannah. And every single time he asks, “Taylor, what about the Brigadier who came searching for you that day? Whatever became of him?” I try to explain that the Brigadier is of no importance to my story, but he always shakes his head as if he knows better.
Melina Marchetta
Someone dies, there oughta be something. It oughta shake the world! You're not supposed to walk away!
Lisa Henry
Aron Moss wrote a wonderful article on this topic in which he explains, ”We don't really want answers, we don't want explanations, and we don't want closure. … We want an end to suffering … but we shouldn't leave it up to God to alleviate suffering. … He is waiting for us to do it. That's what we are here for.
ARON MOSS
Grief is beautiful?' She thought it was the most dreadful feeling possible. At best she viewed the world through a haze, and at worst everything looked black.'It means you've loved another with all your heart,' Luka said. 'What's the use of being alive if you've never loved like that, not even once?
Belinda Alexandra
The risk of all friendship is, alas, a little grief.
Alison Croggon
True sorrows do not pass like clouds or inclement weather...Sorrows are absorbed over time, and you reshape yourself around them. How you absorb them makes you what you are for good or ill. I think the only true and right way is to take our sorrows into us bravely and wholly, knowing they will hurt, and accepting that sometimes pain is unavoidable. It is when grief is suppressed or hidden that it does harm
Isobelle Carmody
The morning after Jim’s death, as I dried off after my shower, I wondered to what extent, if at all, Jim was…around. Could he be with us, unseen or unsensed by us, but able to observe? Most importantly at this moment, could he possibly see me naked?
Kelly Wilson
Suffering is so real & I walk amongst so many who have no idea how much my soul is aching to be healed.
Nikki Rowe
For a long time, there was grief. It pulled me down into suffocating darkness, and kept me anchored there. I went through the motions. I turned up at school. I ate food and watched TV and took algebra tests. But I didn't feel anything. It was easier that way.
Lili Wilkinson
I'll never throw these small things away. There will never be a time when I don't want them, all the tiny parts of Cal that made a life.
Cath Crowley
as if all the years haven't dulled that moment. She's staring at a spot of air in front of it, and I know, in that spot of air, is her son.
Cath Crowley
Do not cry,” she said fiercely, but her own tears flowed. “Do not cry, Finnikin. For if we begin, our tears will never end.
Melina Marchetta
He didn't sleep. His mother was too close. He could see every crease on her face, every worry line he'd ever given her.
Claire Zorn
Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself.
Germaine Greer
There is nothing I can do to keep time from wedging more of itself between us.
Will Kostakis
I can hear Isaac's smile. It softens his words, but they have a different meaning now. Between his mouth and my ears, they pass through everything that has happened since.
Will Kostakis
Why shouldn't the living cords which lace our being together flick softly against a loved one in the very moment of their unraveling?...Sometimes, all the miles between are as nothing, sometimes, they are narrowed to the little silence between the beats of a heart.
Colleen McCullough
Then she said, with piteous defiance, "If I could love her, the Good Lord could, and he won't be too hard on an old lady who didn't have an easy life.
Ruth Park
In the libraryI search for a good book.We have many books,says Mrs. Rose, the librarian,and ALL of them are good.Of course she says that. It's her job.But do I want to read about TrucksTrains and Transport? Or evenHorsesHouses and Hyenas?In the fiction cornerthere are pink boksfull of princessesand girls who want to be princessesand black booksabout bad boysand brave boysand brawny boys.Where is the bookabout a girlwhose poems don't rhymeand whose Granny is fading?Pearl, says Mrs. Rose, the bell has rung.I go back to classempty-handedempty headedempty-hearted.
Sally Murphy
They always prided themselves on looking youthful. “Forty’s the new thirty,” they’d joke.Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty’s the new one hundred.
Melina Marchetta
Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?
Kate Morton
I know now what was happening to me, what was overwhelming me, what was about to consume and almost destroy me. Didier had even given me a name for it - assassin grief, he'd once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks you from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis. But on that day, ... almost a year after Khader's death, I couldn't understand the dark and trembling mood that was moving in me, swelling to the sorrow I'd too long denied. I couldn't understand it, so i tried to fight it as a man fights pain or despair. But you can't bite down on assassin grief and will it away. The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can't miss.
Gregory David Roberts
I see what grief does, how it strips you bare, shows you all the things you don't want to know. That loss doesn't end, that there isn't a moment where you are done, when you can neatly put it away and move on.
Elizabeth Scott
Then he holds her and for a moment I hear total silence; that totally silent part of a cry that announces that the most horrible grief is going to follow. And it does, and he's muffling it, but I can hear and I want someone to come over and jab her with a sedative because its pitch pierces my soul.
Melina Marchetta
It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding.
Markus Zusak
Often I wish this would all be over, Liesel, but then somehow you do something like walk down the basement steps with a snowman in your hands.
Markus Zusak
In the games of queens and kings, we leave our dreams at the door and we make do with what we have. Sometimes if we’re fortunate, we still manage to have a good life.
Melina Marchetta
She looked so disappointed, so grieved and desperate that Clem longed to comfort her, only he couldn't think of thing to say that she hadn't heard a hundred times from Dad and Dr. Snow and Mrs. Mack: how things would get better in time, though no one knew how much time, and that life might be a little better for her and Jess once school began again.
Judith Clarke
We're all bits that the war didn't take, Flinty thought, gazing at the stranger's back. But those left behind had a right to know more about the beast who'd chewed their lives and spat the remnants out.
Jackie French
...I’m tired of everyone looking at me with pity in their eyes. I’m tired of feeling like my heart is being ripped out of my chest every damned day. I’m tired of waking up in the morning, and then remembering...
A.B. Shepherd
I always thought of grief as a blow that took everything out of you. And it is like that. But it stays, past that first hard hit. It stays and blows its breath into you. It's always there, reminding you of what you've lost. What's gone.
Elizabeth Scott
And that's what makes you angry. What makes you hate. You don't want to believe that sometimes bad things happen just because they do.
Elizabeth Scott
Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers' deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother's life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent loss a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.
M.L Stedman
I didn't have enough other people in my life to cover the loss of this many people at once. I didn't have spare aunties or cousins or grandparents. I didn't have backup. I didn't have insurance to cover a loss like this.
Liane Moriarty
In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as one fixed thing, a plaster death mask, which as soon as it was touched crumbled in his figures back into dust.
Richard Flanagan
Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites.For the line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only. And of that colossal ruin, boundless and buried, the lone and level jungle stretched far away. Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass.
Richard Flanagan
She asked another question: "What does it matter if the rhinos die out? Is it really important that they are saved?"This would normally have riled me... but I had come to think of her as Dr. Spock from Star Trek - an emotionless, purely logical creature, at least with regards to her feelings for animals. Like Spock, though, I knew there were one or two things that stirred her, so I gave an honest reply."... to be honest, it doesn't matter. No economy will suffer, nobody will go hungry, no diseases will be spawned. Yet there will never be a way to place a value on what we have lost. Future children will see rhinos only in books and wonder how we let them go so easily. It would be like lighting a fire in the Louvre and watching the Mona Lisa burn. Most people would think 'What a pity' and leave it at that while only a few wept
Peter Allison
I've missed you so much it's felt like missing you is all I am. Like if someone looked inside me, there wouldn't be a skeleton and muscles and blood and nerves. There'd just be memories of you and all the things I've tried to say and ripped out of this notebook, all the things I want to say but can't because I don't have the words.
Elizabeth Scott
The only person you should ever fear losing in a relationship is you yourself.
Miya Yamanouchi
There’s some comfort in seeing things go on; birds keep singing, buses keep running. But if you want those things to continue, perhaps you have to accept that the other kinds of things, unhappier, even horrific ones, will continue too. And that’s harder.
Ashley Hay
The act of you leaving was just the full stop at the end of a terrible sentence. Fact is, I lost you long before you ever left.
Beau Taplin
She didn't know if she was crying because Illukar was going to die, or because Ieskar already had.
Andrea K. Höst
Time is pulling us apart. With every second that passes, the space between us widens. Today, I saw him yesterday. In a few days, it will have been last week. Then, last month. And there is nothing I can do to keep time from wedging more of itself between us. It is inevitable. - Miles
Will Kostakis
A healing heart has no time frame.
Nikki Rowe
Well, this might sound stupid but I think he was my best friend. Like the other half of me. I'm so scared something might have happened to him when he went back. I miss him so much sometimes I look at windows and I want to just walk right through them -- like press myself through the glass. I want their sharp edges to fragment me.
Jaclyn Moriarty
Lost love belongs in a three-minute song, pullling back feelings from a time when they came unbidden, recalling the infatuation, the walking on sunshine that cannot last and the pain of its loss, whether through parting or the passage of time, reminding us that we are emotional beings
Graeme Simsion
As Tom wandered back to Mrs Mewett’s, he thought about the little relics at the lighthouse – Docherty’s knitting, his wife’s jar of humbugs that sat untouched in the pantry. Lives gone, traces left. And he wondered about the despair of the man, destroyed by grief. It didn’t take a war to push you over that edge.
M.L Stedman
Tom thought back to the imposing, empty house: to the silence that deadened every room with a subtly different pitch; to the kitchen smelling of carbolic, kept spotless by a long line of housekeepers. He remembered that dreaded smell of Lux flakes, and his distress as he saw the handkerchief, washed and starched by Mrs Someone-or-other, who had discovered it in the pocket of his shorts and laundered it as a matter of course, obliterating his mother’s smell. He had searched the house for some corner, some cupboard which could bring back that blurry sweetness of her. But even in what had been her bedroom, there was only polish, and mothballs, as though her ghost had finally been exorcised.
M.L Stedman
There is nothing I can give to the lost, except this: I have a responsibility I need to fathom. I have a sorrow I cannot weigh.
Michelle Dicinoski
All four of us were young and undaunted and our smiles were so strong that it made me smile even then on the couch, with a kind of loss.
Markus Zusak
Laine taped the last box shut. That was it, then: All of Gavin's belongings put away; some for charity, some for the dump, some to be saved for a happier 'one day' that Laine felt, right now, was as distant as the stars.
Stephen M. Irwin
Loss leaves us empty- but learn not to close your heart and mind to grief. Allow life to replinish you. When sorrow comes it seems impossible- but new
Pam Brown
Laine slowly rolled out of bed. The queen size was one of the few new things in the house. But now, even the new bed felt tainted. It was an inner-spring monument to lies, a petri dish of mendacity she had shared with her faithless husband, and shared now with creeping dreams that flew from the light but left harsh scratches and diseased black feathers. Laine promised herself that, as soon as, she could, she would rid herself of this house, this bed, her clothes, her jewelry - everything but the flesh she lived in. She would scrub herself clean and flee to start a new life whose first and only commandment would be: Never let thyself be lied to again.
Stephen M. Irwin
It's not the endings that will haunt youBut the space where they should lie,The things that simply fadedWithout one final wave goodbye.
Erin Hanson
I have loved and lost in so many different ways. And I have died endless deaths… So when I ask myself, the question today, who am I? My answer is…I do not know.
Patti Roberts
And gradually his memory slipped a little, as memories do, even those with so much love attached to them; as if there is an unconscious healing process within the mind which mends up in spite of our desperate determination never to forget.
Colleen McCullough
She took a step and didn't want to take any more, but she did.
Markus Zusak
Baggage is a funny thing. The more you have of it, the heavier it becomes and the longer it takes to reach your destination in life.
Chloe Maxwell