Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 77

She ran straight into Leo’s open arms, unable to stop the tears from falling, feeling at last defended, like a single musical note that had finally found the symphony to which it belonged.
Natasha Lester
The boy will grow older, and over time there will be other songs – not many – ten or maybe twenty in a lifespan, that stand apart from the rest of the music he will discover. He will realise as he grows older still, and crosses the Canadian border and drives down into Seattle, that not only are these songs holy or sacred, they are hiding songs – what the Aztec Indians call carrion songs – that deal exclusively in darkness, obfuscation, concealment and secrecy. He will realize that, for him, the purpose of these songs has been to shut off the sun, to draw a long shadow down and protect him from the corrosive glare of the world.
Nick Cave
The boy will grow older, and over time there will be other songs – not many – ten or maybe twenty in a lifespan, that stand apar from the rest of the music he will discover. He will realise as he grows older still, and crosses the Canadian border and drives down into Seattle, that not only are these songs holy or sacred, they are hiding songs – what the Aztec Indians call carrion songs – that deal exclusively in darkness, obfuscation, concealment and secrecy. He will realize that, for him, the purpose of these songs has been to shut off the sun, to draw a long shadow down and protect him from the corrosive glare of the world.
Nick Cave
Bo put a record on the stereo and the speakers crackled, that moment of anticipation before the needle found its way to the first song.An organ, in rhythm. A chord. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”Mum cheered. It was her favorite, the soundtrack to a movie called The Big Chill.
Favel Parrett
The string slices into the skin of his fingers and no matter how tough the calluses, it tears. But this beat is fast and even though his joints are aching, his arm's out of control like it has a mind of its own and the sweat tat drenches his hair and face seems to smother him, but nothing's going to stop Tom. He;s aiming for oblivion.
Melina Marchetta
Out of sorrow entire worlds have been builtOut of longing great wonders have been willed
Nick Cave
In the three minutes it takes the song to play I'm caught in a magic world of harmony and joy, a truly ecstatic joy, where the aching longing to be somewhere else, out of this city, out of this country, out of this body and out of this life, is kept at bay.
Christos Tsiolkas
His touch was like a bard's on his instrument, and it awakened a deep and mysterious music in my body.
Juliet Marillier
Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul.
J.M. Coetzee
I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking straight into the camera, straight at me, and I remember thinking, that's it, that'll be me, you know, that'll be me.
Nick Cave
And all meet in singing, which braids together the different knowings into a wide and subtle music, the music of living.
Alison Croggon
Am I a mindless fool? My life is a fragment, a disconnected dream that has no continuity. I am so tired of senselessness. I am tired of the music that my feelings sing, the dream music.
Ross David Burke
You need to be your own cheer squad not your own worst enemy.
Miya Yamanouchi
The greatest asset you could own, is an open heart.
Nikki Rowe
Be a woman of confidence, not cockiness. Know your boundaries, set no limits. Speak your kindness and turn your back to conformed groups. The only way to be a woman of change in this world, is to walk what you talk and set your own soul free first.
Nikki Rowe
If you don't know what to do next take the oath that will enhance your soul and erase your ego, & from the quiet space inside yourself, you will know what to do.
Nikki Rowe
Every wonderful quality "in" someone is waiting to be recognized in all of life's great symphony.
Donna Goddard
Being liked or not, having company or not, being understood or not, being acknowledged or not are not issues of concern on the spiritual path.
Donna Goddard
If love isn't there, nothing will grow. If it is, there is always hope and it will win in the end. Love is vital and sacrosanct.
Donna Goddard
We are spiritual beings - indestructible, immaterial and safe.
Donna Goddard
Don't let hollow heroes distract you from saving yourself.
Nikki Rowe
What if business was the adventure of living?
Simone Milasas
Do what you love and the rest will come.
Romi Grossberg
You are the energy you attract. Whether you are aware of that or not, everything you come up against is teaching you about that part within yourself. Listen carefully, it's a hint to a better you.
Nikki Rowe
Re-claim your power, don't you dare shrink your worth for someone elses glory. They'll attempt to sabotage your greatnes but it is you that will feel the aftermath of your unwritten story.
Nikki Rowe
Change your focus, give power to the positive and starve the negative. We reduce our inner wisdom to think with logic that's been instilled in us whilst expecting miraculous results. Retrain the core issue and the pathway will build itself.
Nikki Rowe
Practice is a great contributor to success, but you have to be careful what you practice.
Don Crosby
Healing your wounds will hurt, so cry. Cry your pretty little heart out until you have nothing left to shed, that's how beauty is grown; through the darkest of our days we become the light.
Nikki Rowe
However, when we are depressed, being reminded of other people's suffering only serves to increase our self-hatred.
Dorothy Rowe
Do you realize that you've been married to me for just about half of your entire life?"Her head came down, her eyes opened wide to stare at him. "Is that all?" she asked. "It seems an eternity"."Did I say a quiet lion?" Alexander pulled a face. "An eternity with me has turned you into a bitch, my dear".
Colleen McCullough
We are not here together just to make children, Elizabeth. What we're going to do is sanctified by marriage. It's an act of love - of love. Not merely of the flesh, but of the mind and even the soul. There's nothing about it you shouldn't welcome.
Colleen McCullough
Dr. Murray made it clear to me before I left that a woman who enhoys the Act is as loose as a harlot. God gives pleasure in it only to husbands. Women are the source of evil and temptation, therefore women are to blame when men fall into fleshly error. It was Eve who seduced Adam, Eve who entered into league with the serpent, who was the Devil in disguise. So the only pleasure women are allowed is in their children.
Colleen McCullough
I have discovered," he said to Charles Dewy, "that when a man marries, peace of mind and freedom go out of the window.""Well, old boy," said Charles comfortably, "that's the price we have to pay for having company in our old age and for ensuring that we have heirs to follow us.
Colleen McCullough
He owe his wife a debt he couldn't hope to pay with any coin save one: open the cage and let the bird fly.
Colleen McCullough
He hadn't wooed her, but had simply claimed her. A gold mine ready to dig. There should have been a period of quiet dinners together, of flowers rather than diamonds, of kisses given after permission to kiss, of a slow awakening that predisposed her to greater intimacies. But no, not the great Alexander Kinross! He had met her, he had married her the next day, and climbed into her bed after one kiss in the church. There to prove himself an animal in her eyes. One mistake after another, that was the story of his relationship with Elizabeth. And Ruby had always meant more.
Colleen McCullough
I think that Richard was more of a one-girl-for-the-rest-of-your-life-marry-and-make-a-family kind of guy.
S.A. Tawks
Why hadn't that been part of his stupid lifelong redemption program: Do what my wife asks immediately so she doesn't feel like a nag.
Liane Moriarty
Women's work, married or unmarried, is menial and low paid. Women's right to possess property is curtailed, more if they are married. How can marriage provide security? In any case a husband is a possession which can be lost or stolen and the abandoned wife of thirty odd with a couple of children is far more desolate and insecure in her responsibility than an unmarried woman with or without children ever could be.
Germaine Greer
The second class status of marriage became one of the principal issues in the Reformation. Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar, had barely posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg when he took himself a wife.
Germaine Greer
The bonds between husband and wife spring from deep laws of destiny and should not be broken lightly.
Lian Hearn
We believe that Jesus has made His home in our hearts, and as long as we carry Him there, God's love will keep our love strong no matter where we are.
Nick Vujicic
If he could just have one more chance, he'd act like the man he'd always believed himself to be.
Liane Moriarty
He knew how the audition was going to affect their lives for the next ten weeks as she slowly lost her mind from nerves and the strain of trying to scrounge precious practice time from an already jam-packed life. No matter how much time poor Sam gave her, it would never be quite enough, because what she actually needed was for him and the kids to just temporarily not exist. She needed to slip into another dimension where she was a single, childless person. Just between now and the audition. She needed to go to a mountain chalet (somewhere with good acoustics) and live and breathe nothing but music. Go for walks. Meditate. Eat well. Do all those positive-visualization exercises young musicians did these days. She had an awful suspicion that if she were to do this in reality, she might not even miss Sam and the children that much, or if she did miss them, it would be quite bearable.
Liane Moriarty
She meant that they'd never used words like "separation" and "divorce" even in their worst screaming matches. They yelled things like, "You're infuriating!" "You don't think!" "You are the most annoying woman in the history of annoying women!" "I hate you!" "I hate you more!" and they always, always used the word "always," even though Clementine's mother had said you should never use that word in an argument with your spouse, as in, for example, "You always forget to refill the water jug!" (But Sam did always forget. It was accurate.)
Liane Moriarty
This was historical revisionism at its best, and hadn't Sam always specialized in that, hadn't she always said she wished she had a permanent film rolling of their life so she could go back and prove that, yes, he did so say that thing he now denied?
Liane Moriarty
It's about making a choice to make your marriage a priority, to, kind of, put that at the top of the page, as your mission statement or something.
Liane Moriarty
Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.
Germaine Greer
The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly.
Germaine Greer
Marriage cannot be a job as it has become.
Germaine Greer
A month ago, Gavin had given his employer four weeks' notice. "I'll get a job around here," he'd told her. "Something low-stress, part-time, maybe. We're not paying rent, and Dad's left us plenty. You should quit, too." A year earlier this news would have filled her with delicious, full fat, chocolate-coated joy. But now, after a grueling routine of shitty work, shitty- weird home life in a house where the shadow of a dead boy walked more solidly than the grownups, shitty headaches, shitty worry about a husband who couldn't keep his dick out of other women, the golden offer just weirded Laine out. She didn't trust it.
Stephen M. Irwin
His own parents, the estimable Gilchrists, a couple who had taken the 'till death' part of their own wedding vows so seriously he wouldn't be surprised if they one day throttled one another, had naturally wangled the next best seat in the house: row two, on the aisle.
Ally Blake
All the tiny things made this mammoth union up, all the times he had picked her up from Sutherland station, made her chicken salad rolls and brought her a Lipton's iced tea, called her about Sunday and fixed Nina's shed door hinge, held her and not fucked her when she was dying with period pain, thought of what she said last night and made something of it the following afternoon, all these unspectacular deposits of love he had made and they were the currency, earning enough to have her see that he was nothing but the right one.
Brendan Cowell
An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife.
Nikki Gemmell
Rosa Hubermann was sitting on the edge of the bed with her husband's accordion tied to her chest. Her fingers hovered above the keys. She did not move. She didn't ever appear to be breathing.
Markus Zusak
Reframing your past painful experiences and seeing them in a humorous light takes away the power and emotional charge attached to the memory of the hurtful event.
Miya Yamanouchi
Besides the pain in my gut, why shouldn't I laugh? I've almost escaped death in a foreign country.
S.A. Tawks
The pain of the journey should challenge you to make change, the vision of what could be drives you forward.
Tony Curl
I fall asleep with the sound of her voice echoing in my head, and a feeling in my chest like someone is scooping my heart out with a spoon.
Melissa Keil
Pain is inevitable... Suffering is optional. We will all have to endure trauma and challenges. What matters is how we move forward afterward. Do we keep carrying the trauma and its causes in our mind? Or can we find a way to let go of them, to end our own suffering?...This is where mindfulness can help us.
David Michie
Sometimes there was the pure, primal pain of grief, and other times there was anger, the frantic desire to claw and hit and kill, and sometimes, like right now, ther was just ordinary, dull sadness, settling itself softly, suffocatingly over her like a heave fog.She was just so damned sad.
Liane Moriarty