Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 89

It could be said that we become so much a stranger that we disappear and find ourselves reborn in the midst of humanity which is quite a paradox.
Donna Goddard
To live without awareness is to live as the deaf, blind, and dumb in a world of vibrant light and sound.
Belsebuub
If we become aware that someone is sending thoughts of ill will in our direction, we do not argue with the apparent reality of malice. To do so would give it more substance. We remove the personal sense of ourself and the other person.
Donna Goddard
What you have within you in your life is what you are after death. If you have explored it to some extent, you would see how life continues after death, and know that after death the consequences of the way that you have lived follow.
Belsebuub
Consciousness cannot be glimpsed as though it were something outside yourself, because it is you.
Belsebuub
Don’t feel bad about feeling bad. Don’t be frightened of feeling afraid. Don’t be angry about getting angry. There is no need to give up when we are feeling depressed. Nor should we be dismayed at the grief which often accompanies the outgrowing of anything which needs outgrowing. We can be glad that our soul is speaking to us and pushing us onwards. We frequently need to persevere with a period of inner turmoil before the dust can settle and be swept out the door.
Donna Goddard
Dreams are an insight into our psychology: they are what we are, but stripped of the conventions and norms of psychology, and the rules of the physical world…
Belsebuub
Being in the present moment, one can step outside the mechanical train of life, and this is where the inner revolution begins.
Belsebuub
The spiritual work builds upon awareness, increases consciousness, transforms it, merges it with the divine, and this is how to reach true spirituality in life.
Belsebuub
For spiritual change, we need to see and understand ourselves. What sees is consciousness, it is what perceives, and is essentially what we are. To understand ourselves we need to look within and study how we think and feel, and doing that is called self-observation.
Belsebuub
There’s a huge difference between reading about out-of-body experiences or watching videos about them and lifting out of your body and traveling through space in a different dimension. Why not experience a greater multidimensional reality rather than just reading about it? Discover what science doesn’t know and cannot ever know – it’s your life and you have a choice to break free of the known and live in a different way.
Belsebuub
An idea of awakening is not awakening. It’s simply an idea. It’s not the real thing. The real thing happens in our lives.
Belsebuub
A major consequence of being psychologically asleep is the psychological and spiritual blindness which results from it. This results in action not from conscious awareness and true intelligence but from self-righteousness, which leads individuals and society as a whole into an abysmal pit.
Belsebuub
The unceasing flow of thought in all its various forms is an inescapable and defining aspect of the human condition.
Paul O'Brien
Life is not a competition. No one has to lose for someone else to win. A true blessing blesses everyone. A fragmented love which makes others lose will eventually turn upon itself and destroy the very thing which was being so carefully guarded. An open-hearted love will follow a course which can only lead somewhere good.
Donna Goddard
Good fiction writers have an instinctive understanding of human nature. That's what makes stories and characters captivating. Good spiritual writers share what they sincerely practice themselves.
Donna Goddard
The same principles that make a spiral galaxy also create the structure of a seashell and unfurling of a fern. This is why ancient spiritual people used natural symbols to convey universal concepts.
Belsebuub
Pleasure brings pain, but inner silence brings nothing negative; it is in itself of great value and is a far better way to be than to be in ego states.
Belsebuub
Logically, you should go to school, get good grades, go to college, get a good degree, go into the workplace, then work hard and be happy. The only problem is that happiness isn't logical.
A.C. Ping
There is a greater purpose to living which is found in the spirit, which is the Being, and that purpose is worth living for.
Belsebuub
To bring about the new takes not just a development of the old, but a radical leap forward - revolutionary and transforming - and that requires extra factors that were not present before.
Belsebuub
There is far more spiritual potential within than most people realize. The potential is so great that to define it in words would be impossible.
Belsebuub
God help us to live slowly:To move simply:To look softly:To allow emptiness:To let the heart create for us.Amen.
Michael Leunig
Second hand books had so much life in them. They'd lived, sometimes in many homes, or maybe just one. They'd been on airplanes, traveled to sunny beaches, or crowded into a backpack and taken high up a mountain where the air thinned."Some had been held aloft tepid rose-scented baths, and thickened and warped with moisture. Others had child-like scrawls on the acknowledgement page, little fingers looking for a blank space to leave their mark. Then there were the pristine novels, ones that had been read carefully, bookmarks used, almost like their owner barely pried the pages open so loathe were they to damage their treasure.I loved them all.And I found it hard to part with them. Though years of book selling had steeled me. I had to let them go, and each time made a fervent wish they'd be read well, and often.Missy, my best friend, said I was completely cuckoo, and that I spent too much time alone in my shadowy shop, because I believed my books communicated with me. A soft sigh here, as they stretched their bindings when dawn broke, or a hum, as they anticipated a customer hovering close who might run a hand along their cover, tempting them to flutter their pages hello. Books were fussy when it came to their owners, and gave off a type of sound, an almost imperceptible whirr, when the right person was near. Most people weren't aware that books chose us, at the time when we needed them.
Rebecca Raisin
You've got the look of a girl who's no stranger to the page, I can tell. You got words in your soul. ...The books we love, they love us back. And just as we mark our places in the pages, those pages leave their marks on us. I can see it in you, sure as I see it in me. You're a daughter of words. A girl with a story to tell.
Jay Kristoff
But sir, I'm seventeen," I reply bluntly. "I'm genetically programmed to want to make statements.
Sarah Ayoub
I love lying here with you, under the books.
Cath Crowley
Jesus, Mary …”She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see the paintwork. There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the gray, the every-colored books. It was one of the most beautiful things Liesel Meminger had ever seen.With wonder, she smiled.That such a room existed!Even when she tried to wipe the smile away with her forearm, she realized instantly that it was a pointless exercise. She could feel the eyes of the woman traveling her body, and when she looked at her, they had rested on her face.There was more silence than she ever thought possible. It extended like an elastic, dying to break. The girl broke it.“Can I?”The two words stood among acres and acres of vacant, wooden-floored land. The books were miles away.The woman nodded.Yes, you can
Markus Zusak
The e-reading revolution may have reached our shores this year but it has yet to reckon with Australia's summer holidays. Intense sunlight plays havoc with screens and the sand invades every nook and cranny, so as convenient and sexy as your new iPad may be, the battered paperback, its pages pocked and swollen from contact with briny hands, will likely remain the beach format of choice for a few years yet.
Geordie Williamson
And reading this way - with no deadline, no agenda - she remembered why she loved literature so much. It was like fucking a new man and knowing that he had made other women come, but that when she came it would be an unshareable, untranslatable pleasure. She opened herself up to her books, and the words got inside her and fucked her senseless.
Emily Maguire
All told, she owned fourteen books, but she saw her story as being made up predominantly of ten of them. Of those ten, six were stolen, one showed up at the kitchen table, two were made for her by a hidden Jew, and one was delivered by a soft, yellow-dressed afternoon.
Markus Zusak
Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar. You have to hold it, you have to read it.
Ben Elton
Do you know what it is?' [Toby] said thoughtfully. 'It's that they haven't had anything really awful happen to them. No wonder they seem so superficial and unfeeling.' It was certainly an interesting theory, ... [but] surely one didn't need to have suffered in order to possess empathy for those who had? All it required was a bit of imagination and a well-stocked library.
Michelle Cooper
She would go off in the morning with the punt full of books, and spend long glorious days away in the forest lying on the green springy carpet of whortleberries, reading. She would most diligently work at furnishing her empty mind. She would sternly endeavour to train it not to jump.
Elizabeth von Arnim
I spend many hours in conversation with wonderful characters from fantastic books.
Patti Roberts
For centuries, no one was concerned that books weren’t girl-friendly, because no one really cared if girls read; but even so, we persisted for long enough that literature has slowly come to accommodate us. Modern boys, by contrast, are not trying to read in a culture of opposition. Nobody is telling them reading doesn’t matter, that boys don’t need to read and that actually, no prospective wife looks for literacy in a husband. Quite the opposite! Male literary culture thrives, both teachers and parents are throwing books at their sons, and the fact that the books aren’t sticking isn’t, as the nature of the complaint makes clear, because boys don’t like reading – no. The accusation is that boys don’t like reading about girls, which is a totally different matter.Because constantly, consistently, our supposedly equal society penalises boys who express an interest in anything feminine. The only time boys are discouraged from books all together is in contexts where, for whatever reason, they’ve been given the message that reading itself is girly – which is a wider extrapolation of the same problem.
Foz Meadows
The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.
Phillip Adams
Steadily, the room shrank, till the book thief could touch the shelves within a few small steps. She ran the back of her hand along the first shelf, listening to the shuffle of her fingernails gliding across the spinal cord of each book. It sounded like an instrument, or the notes of running feet. She used both hands. She raced them. One shelf against the other. And she laughed. Her voice was sprawled out, high in her throat, and when she eventually stopped and stood in the middle of the room, she spent many minutes looking from the shelves to her fingers and back again. How many books had she touched? How many had she felt? She walked over and did it again, this time much slower, with her hand facing forward, allowing the dough of her palm to feel the small hurdle of each book. It felt like magic, like beauty, as bright lines of light shone down from a chandelier. Several times, she almost pulled a title from its place but didn't dare disturb them. They were too perfect.
Markus Zusak
The paper landed on the table, but the news was stapled to his chest. A tattoo.
Markus Zusak
I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.
Markus Zusak
Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Stories are life," protested Pico. "Without them, books would be only paper and ink, with them they breathe, the reader is drawn in, the stories become him.
Keith Miller
A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.
Richard Flanagan
My fingers positively itched to drift at length along their spines, to arrive at one whose lure I could not pass, to pluck it down, to inch it open, then to close my eyes and inhale the soul-sparking scent of old and literate dust.
Kate Morton
What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.
Geraldine Brooks
The books we love, they love us back. And just as we mark our places in the pages, those pages leave their marks on us.
Jay Kristoff
We become the books we read.
Matthew Kelly
The book thief has struck for the first time – the beginning of an illustrious career.
Markus Zusak
A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.
Geraldine Brooks
Too many books. Too few centuries.
Jay Kristoff
How does it feel, anyway?"How does what feel?"When you take one of those books?"At that moment, she chose to keep still. If he wants an answer, he'd have to come back, and he did. "Well?" he asked, but again, it was the boy who replied, before Liesel could even open her mouth.It feels good, doesn't it? To steal something back.
Markus Zusak
I don’t have many friends, not the living, breathing sort at any rate. And I don’t mean that in a sad and lonely way; I’m just not the type of person who accumulates friends or enjoys crowds. I’m good with words, but not spoken kind; I’ve often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper. And I suppose, in a sense, that’s what I do, for I’ve hundreds of the other sort, the friends contained within bindings, pages after glorious pages of ink, stories that unfold the same way every time but never lose their joy, that take me by the hand and lead me through doorways into worlds of great terror and rapturous delight. Exciting, worthy, reliable companions - full of wise counsel, some of them - but sadly ill-equipped to offer the use of a spare bedroom for a month or two.
Kate Morton
The point is, it didn’t really matter what the book was about. It was what it meant that was important.
Markus Zusak
A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.
Richard Flanagan
She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see paintwork. There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the gray, the every-colored books. It was one of the most beautiful things Liesel Meminger had ever seen.With wonder, she smiled.That such a room existed!
Markus Zusak
As always, one of her books was next to her.
Markus Zusak
My arms are killing me. I didn't know words could be so heavy.
Markus Zusak
I love books. I like that the moment you open one and sink into it you can escape from the world, into a story that's way more interesting that yours will ever be.
Elizabeth Scott
He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world.She was the book thief without the words.Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain.
Markus Zusak