Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 79

Maybe we have shoes so we can learn to walk in another's oath before judging their footsteps?
Nikki Rowe
The stars looked down at me from infinite space. We are tiny, they said, but you are insignificant.
Shane Maloney
We obey people we don't trust, to buy things we don't need, to impress people we don't like, using money we don't have, for gratifications that don't last, killing animals we don't hate, for pleasures that don't satisfy, dreaming of a life we don't deserve, and praying for an afterlife that doesn't exist, we are a stupid species
Philip Wollen
All the little devils are proud of their hell
Wake in Fright
Nothing opens up the mind and the heart like books do, and so they have the power to change the whole world. That's why the are burning books, Ava. To stop us thinking, and feeling, and imagining...
Kate Forsyth
Ava's father believed that myths and fairy tales - like dreams - opened a window into the unconscious. by listening to the language of dreams and old tales, he said, all humans could learn to understand themselves and the world, better.
Kate Forsyth
Just as I was about to close my eyes I saw a faint line connecting the shadows, like string you take into a forest so you don’t lose your way. Everything in the room was joined by one line; the frame to the curtain, the coil to the crack, the belt to the shoe. I closed my eyes and in the vision behind the skin of my lids I saw the line stretch way out to sea, like cobweb blown by the wind, further and further; it crossed the Pacific until the Pacific became the Indian and it found Robby in his ship. It touched his shoulder and moved across the sleeve of his shirt and up to his eyes and across the top of his head and then the line went to all the other men on the ship; then all the way back to me. Everyone was joined.
Sofie Laguna
I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.
Sonya Hartnett
I'm just another stupid human.
Markus Zusak
I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skills is their capacity to escalate.
Markus Zusak
The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place.
Christine Kenneally
The rules of syntax and intonation and words matured over time into the system we have today because they were progressively refined by use and the forge of survival and reproduction - not because the brain got big and complicated for some other reason, and all of a sudden we discovered we could now manipulate symbols as well.
Christine Kenneally
For fourteen years Wiliam Walker alias Brown alias Shields alias Swallow alias Waldon alias Todd alias Watson had been a major irritant to British authorities on both sides of the world. To the London police he was an accomplished thief. To the colonial government in Van Diemen's Land, he was a clever and determined escaper; he had stolen one of its vessels and caused much embarrassment by making it back to England not once but twice, one of only a handful of runaways to do so. To these skills of theft and evasion must be added outstanding seamanship, a glib tongue, extraordinary resourcefulness and a capacity for leadership. Among his more admirable attributes his loyalty to his family should also not be forgotten. To the convicts of Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur he was a living legend, tangible proof that escape from the island prison was possible. By any standards, he was a remarkable man...
Warwick Hirst
Our ancestors lived in groups of no more than a few hundred people, and those on the other side of a river or mountain range might as well have been living in a separate world. We developed ethical principles to help us to deal with problems within our community, not to help those outside it. The harms that it was considered wrong to cause were generally clear and well defined. We developed inhibitions against, and emotional responses to, such actions, and these instinctive or emotional reactions still form the basis for much of our moral thinking.
Peter Singer
Physical development was alleged to assist spiritual and intellectual development, while also helping safeguard boys from the 'solitary and sexual sin' of masturbation.
Martin Crotty
He (Frederick II) famously describe Poland as an 'artichoke, ready to be consumed leaf by leaf
Christopher Clark
This is Shakespeare and Company, it's the most famous bookstore in the world." She pointed to the shelves that reached the ceiling. "Surely you have something on the feudal system or the court of the Sun King?""All our books are in English, and there is not a great demand for works on the French aristocracy.""That's the problem with Americans, they're only interested in themselves," she sighed. "I learned about the Civil War every year from the fifth grade, but I never studied the Wars of the Roses.
Anita Hughes
History may be just bones and ruins to you, but it is people, Janet. People loving, hurting, and dying.
Cindy Tomamichel
History in the storyteller's hand was a potent force indeed,....
Kate Morton
His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.
Patrick White
-to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!
Richard Flanagan
I did not know that history is like a blood stain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we pint over it.
Peter Carey
Reading. The erotics of reading for me -- its moment of trembling pleasure -- lie in those times when I realise that what I am reading is just what I was about to say. It is a moment of jealousy and disappointment, as if the occasion had been stolen from me, but it is a moment of excitement, too -- because I think I would like to try and say it better, because now the monologue in my mind has become dialogue. My immediate impulse is to write something, anything, notes to tell me the significance of what I have read, an appreciative letter to the author, the first sentences in a preface to a book that will never be written. Th archives of my readings are monumentally high. I can never let these erotic moments go. They are the paper trail of my mind.
Greg Dening
The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding indefatigable and distant past that had crashed intact through barriers of time into its own future. I liked it.
Gregory David Roberts
That was the nature of history, of course: notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors.
Kate Morton
Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so - to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!
Kate Morton
There are ghosts of yourself scattered everywhere,Whispers of a moment suspended in time,Where every life that you've brushed up againstNow lives with a piece of you trapped in their mind.
Erin Hanson
But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative.
Thomas Keneally
There’s a fine line between gossip and history, when one is talking about kings.
Michelle Cooper
Son, you can't go around painting yourself black, you hear?" "Why not, Papa?" "Because they'll take you away." "Why?" "Because you shouldn't want to be like black people or Jewish people or anyone who is...not us." "Who are Jewish people?" "You know my oldest customer, Mr. Kaufmann? Where we bought your shoes?" "Yes." "Well, he's Jewish." "I didn't know that. Do you have to pay to be Jewish? Do you need a license?" ..... "...you've got beautiful blond hair and big safe blue eyes. You should be happy with that; is that clear?
Markus Zusak
Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so - to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!
Kate Morton
There are ghosts of yourself scattered everywhere,Whispers of a moment suspended in time,Where every life that you've brushed up againstNow lives with a piece of you trapped in their mind.
Erin Hanson
But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative.
Thomas Keneally
There’s a fine line between gossip and history, when one is talking about kings.
Michelle Cooper
Son, you can't go around painting yourself black, you hear?" "Why not, Papa?" "Because they'll take you away." "Why?" "Because you shouldn't want to be like black people or Jewish people or anyone who is...not us." "Who are Jewish people?" "You know my oldest customer, Mr. Kaufmann? Where we bought your shoes?" "Yes." "Well, he's Jewish." "I didn't know that. Do you have to pay to be Jewish? Do you need a license?" ..... "...you've got beautiful blond hair and big safe blue eyes. You should be happy with that; is that clear?
Markus Zusak
To struggle against darkness is not to blunder ignorantly; intelligence is needed to generate right action. Wisdom guides whether to act or not, and if so how. Sometimes darkness is overwhelming and intelligent action is required. Sometimes silence and inaction is required, but a silence which is the result of intelligence is different from that born of ego states such as pride, fear and laziness.
Belsebuub
I didn't lose anyone, for everyone that I lost was never really a loss, unless it was death well then I had to have words with God.
Nikki Rowe
Money is energy and in the right hands can help heal the world.
Nikki Rowe
What if your Vision Board came true?
Juliette Power
Cease distracting your mind of things with little substance.
Nikki Rowe
You wake up oneday and it's different, not so much in a physical way but in the way you look at things. I think when you reach that primary moment in your life, you finally have the courage to let go of the human attachments and start to live in a way that compliments your heart and soul.
Nikki Rowe
Each of us at our root is consciousness, and in the highest of the spiritual realms life and form become light. I experienced this in an OBE in which I went to the outer ring of the source of creation.
Belsebuub
The moment you resist change, you resist existing past your current state of awareness.
Nikki Rowe
Enlightenment isn't a vast field of open opportunities that will change your life, actually it is but first it will destruct anything in its path unattached to the version of you that is awake. That's the part no one prepares for, it will break you to the core but the break will make you something greater then you ever thought imagineable.
Nikki Rowe
Seek the temple within, the silent place you can go in the midst of it all.
Nikki Rowe
Solitude, at first is scary. All you have is yourself. After a while its comforting, it knows the real you and cant judge you for it. If you live it long enough it becomes an addiction, like all things, too much of it and you will go insane but not enough of it will also send you there.n
Nikki Rowe
The earth sometimes rewards humans who do good works for the planet. Look out for unexpected windfalls of produce from the earth such as baskets of fruit or vegetables given to you unexpectedly, nature handcrafts, or a bunch of flowers picked from a beloved garden. These are all signs that the gifts not only came from the giver but from Mother Earth herself. - Fairy of the woods
Sarah Rajkotwala
To be a pioneer of your own life, living an existence that has purpose and meaning you must first remove the past baggage that takes up space in all of your body, home and surroundings. Clean out the core soul clutter of built up three dimensional pathways to allow yourself the energy to overcome, heal and outgrow what no longer is. We are taught that our realities are a reflection of our thoughts and emotions and that we can alter anything with the law of attraction and i couldn't disagree more. Its so much deeper than that, it'd be insanity if it were that simple. Thoughts are powerful, i believe that much but without practical steps, vision and risks towards something that sets your soul on fire; changes and adverse situations to try distract you from your truth; words are just words and the meaning we give them can vary from person to person. We attract what we give focus to, we collide with the energy we hold within ourselves, we are constant mirrors of a bio product of the enviroment in which we have not only created but accepted or tolerated, regardless of what we percieve our circumstances to be. When you can sit with that truth and hold yourself accountable for your part in the unfolding of your journey you will come to a realization of self that will guide you all the way home. Becoming a pioneer is mastering self in few aspects within the human conciousness, be the change, let the way you live be your story.
Nikki Rowe
Low states are a like a poison to the psyche. Millions of people throughout the world take tranquillizers each day to combat depression, but this does not tackle its root cause, which is found in the basic state of the internal energies of the psyche.Basically the energy of the psyche needs to change, from low states to spiritual ones. It requires inner observation, the destruction of the egos, and alchemical transformation.
Belsebuub
It is said, in Imardin, that the wind has a soul, and that it wails through the narrow streets because it is grieved by what it finds there.
Trudi Canavan
Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.
Germaine Greer
we became the books we read.
Matthew Kelly
Those afternoons in the library, breathing the stale sun-warmed dust of a thousand stories (accented by the collective mildew of a hundred years of rising damp), had been enchanted.
Kate Morton
...his favorite books, those he'd read over and over so he knew just the lurch his heart would make when he turned the page and encountered the illustration of the despondent dragon under a half-moon or the fervor with which he flipped the final pages of another, the story so vivid he felt his relationship with that book was less an act of reading than a visit, a place he went to.
Keith Miller
Being able to read a book in another language is a source of ego-stroking pride.
Emily O’Beirne
Books are where the true magic happens.
Jen Wilde
But I love you, and before you say it words do matter. They're not pointless. If they were pointless then they couldn't start revolutions and they wouldn't change history and they wouldn't be the things that you think about every night before you go to sleep. If they were just words we wouldn't listen to songs, we wouldn't beg to be read to when we're kids. If they were just words, then they'd have no meaning and stories wouldn't have been around since before humans could write. We wouldn't have learned to write. If they were just words then people wouldn't fall in love because of them, feel bad because of them, ache because of them, stop aching because of them, have sex, quite a lot of the time, because of them.
Cath Crowley
What she really felt like doing was reading. Escaping into the Enchanted Wood, up the Faraway Tree, or with the Famous Five into Smuggler's Top.
Kate Morton
She seemed to think reading was some sort of hobby, as opposed to being as necessary as breathing, sleeping, and eating.
Michelle Cooper
What a blessing it is to love books.
Elizabeth von Arnim