Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 95

It is at Easter that Jesus is most human, and like all humans, he fails and is failed. His is not an all-powerful God, it is an all-vulnerable God.
Michael Leunig
The quest for enlightenment illustrates the paradox of desire—the fact that you must have desire to be motivated to transcend being ruled by desire.
Paul O'Brien
I'm not convinced that the universe is balanced. Maybe for the universe to be balanced, first we need to be balanced, becauseit's only then can balance really be delivered. I'm pretty sure if I view the world as a bitter, twisted individual, all I will meet are other bitter, twisted people. When I acknowledge my emtions, but embrace awareness I find balance. When I fight my emotions I find imbalance.
Tony Curl
It was the ultimate celestial orgasm and I felt like a cup overflowing with plenty. The pulse of God moving through me brought such intense pleasure that I felt I might burst like the ripest berry in the sun.
Linda Cull
You don't have to live in a mansion to be happy. All you need is to create the right space; something that says this is who you are, and you can always change who you are, just as you change your environment.
Anthea Syrokou
What if I start training my consciousness to know that it is a time and space traveller of unlimited proportions?
Ricci-Jane Adams
you create your world with your thoughts
Rhonda Byrne
Человек, который никуда не спешит, никуда не попадает.
Gregory David Roberts
Challenges turned the eye inward to empower a renewed self for an enhanced future.
Mala Naidoo
Reading is air in my lungs, fire in my blood, company in my thoughts.
Mala Naidoo
A bookshop is a peaceful sanctuary of silent voices waiting to heard
Mala Naidoo
Sometimes the only way forward is to let go and sometimes those things you are forced to let go of are people and places that have been of great significance. Life is painfully uncanny like that, some moments last a lifetime whilst others have an expiry date.
Nikki Rowe
Attitude at work shows attitude in life. If you want to know how people are doing in their lives, watch how they perform in their work. Do they have full commitment in giving their best to whatever they do? Do they treat their very act of being involved in an activity seriously? You can see that people who work halfheartedly are the very same people who get halfhearted results in life. The truth is we are always in a game because life is a game. We either play to win or not.Those who are serious about winning are the ones who do. Most people want to have fun playing the game, but winners are the ones who want to have serious fun. The most fun you can have in anything you do is by playing to win & by winning. The irony of life is that those who are not serious about life, end up in situations that are not funny. Winning results from the intention to win. The stronger your intent to win, the more your probabilities of winning. Playing to win mindset is considered obsolete by many, but you will see that whenever two evenly matched players are competing head to head, the one who is more intent on winning is the one who does. Individuals with strong intention of winning are able to overcome tougher challenges.Intention to win is important.Play to win.
Ron Malhotra
Till tomorrow good sir one must but gaze at stars
Andrew Fisher
These people will try to manipulate you, try to bring you down but remember baby girl you are a queen, own your crown.
Nikki Rowe
A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself, and to deny knowledge of oneself is to stumble through life as handicapped as the blind mute.
Tobsha Learner
As a fantasist, I well understand the power of escapism, particularly as relates to romance. But when so many stories aimed at the same audience all trumpet the same message – And Lo! There shall be Two Hot Boys, one of them your Heart’s Intended, the other a vain Pretender who is also hot and with whom you shall have guilty makeouts before settling down with your One True Love – I am inclined to stop viewing the situation as benign and start wondering why, for instance, the heroines in these stories are only ever given a powerful, magical destiny of great importance to the entire world so long as fulfilling it requires male protection, guidance and companionship, and which comes to an end just as soon as they settle their inevitable differences with said swain and start kissing.I mean to invoke is something of the danger of mob rule, only applied to narrative and culture. Viz: that the comparative harmlessness of individuals does not prevent them from causing harm en masse. Take any one story with the structure mentioned above, and by itself, there’s no problem. But past a certain point, the numbers begin to tell – and that poses a tricky question. In the case of actual mobs, you’ll frequently find a ringleader, or at least a core set of agitators: belligerent louts who stir up feeling well beyond their ability to contain it. In the case of novels, however, things aren’t so clear cut. Authors tell the stories they want to tell, and even if a number of them choose to write a certain kind of narrative either in isolation or inspired by their fellows, holding any one of them accountable for the total outcome would be like trying to blame an avalanche on a single snowflake. Certainly, we may point at those with the greatest (arguable) influence or expostulate about creative domino effects, but as with the drop that breaks the levee, it is impossible to try and isolate the point at which a cluster of stories became a culture of stories – or, for that matter, to hold one particular narrative accountable for the whole.
Foz Meadows
Context is everything in both narrative and real life, and while the accusation is never that these creators deliberately set out to discriminate against gay and female characters, the unavoidable implication is that they should have known better than to add to the sum total of those stories which, en masse, do exactly that. And if the listmakers can identify the trend so thoroughly – if, despite all the individual qualifications, protests and contextualisations of the authors, these problems can still be said to exist – then the onus, however disconnected from the work of any one individual, nonetheless falls to those individuals, in their role as cultural creators, to acknowledge the problem; to do better next time; perhaps even to apologise. This last is a particular sticking point. By and large, human beings tend not to volunteer apologies for things they perceive to be the fault of other people, for the simple reason that apology connotes guilt, and how can we feel guilty – or rather, why should we – if we’re not the ones at fault? But while we might argue over who broke a vase, the vase itself is still broken, and will remain so, its shards ground into the carpet, until someone decides to clean it up.Blog Post: Love Team Freezer
Foz Meadows
If a bloke gave you a hundred quid for a book you can bet your life it’s his way, but if all the poor and suffering people raise their hats to you for writing it - that’s different; it makes it worthwhile then.
Alan Marshall
How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of "authenticity" by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the "authenticity" of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for "authenticity" in such novels almost always ends up being "how much do the women suffer", instead of - as might also be the case - "how sexist are the heroes".And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can't they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of "authenticity" is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing.-Comment at Staffer's Book Review 4/18/2012 to "Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency
Foz Meadows
No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don't approximate. Don't settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching instead for those that explain exactly what you think. What you feel.
Kate Morton
For a moment, I debated whether I should tell someone about the words I'd started writing down, but I couldn't. In a way, I felt ashamed, even though my writing was the one thing that whispered okayness in my ear. I didn't speak it, to anyone.
Markus Zusak
It'll be a change," says Marcus. "Something different.""Not a mystery."Marcus laughs. "No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history."Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.
Kate Morton
You should give it to Max, Liesel. See if you can leave it on the bedside table, like all the other things." Liesel watched him as if he'd gone insane. "How, though?" Lightly, he tapped her skull with his knuckles. "Memorize it. Then write it down for him.
Markus Zusak
For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.
Garth Nix
[Presently, science undergraduates] do not learn to write clearly and briefly, marshalling their points in due and aesthetically satisfying order, and eliminating inessentials. They are inept at those turns of phrase or happy analogy which throw a flying bridge across a chasm of misunderstanding and make contact between mind and mind.
William Lawrence Bragg
That's typically what writers do; we just sit around complaining most of the time. And the better things are going, the more they complain.
Markus Zusak
Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful.
Thomas Keneally
Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.
Richard Flanagan
If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, "Wake up and write the book!
Kerry Greenwood
I think, because…well, I like the idea of coming up with a story that never existed before, but I don’t really want to be in charge. I don’t want to be famous. I guess I like the idea of sitting in the dark and knowing that I created the thing on screen, that it’s my story, but, like, no-one else has to know it was me. Does that make sense?
Melissa Keil
Being a writer is 1% inspiration, 50% perspiration and 49% explaining you're not a millionaire like J.K.Rowling.
Gabrielle Tozer
Imagination is Everything!
Termina Ashton
...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.
Markus Zusak
There is no such thing as an "aspiring writer". You are a writer. Period.
Matthew Reilly
Please God, when I open my eyes, make this nightmare disappear.
Catherine Jane Fisher
It is of the very nature of partial seeing that we cannot see all the reconciliation of the parts we see, because it is only in the whole that they are one, and we do not see the whole. The word we form cannot wholly express God: only the Word He generates can do that. To be irked at this necessary darkness is as though we were irked at not being God.
Frank Sheed
They are all dead now, Diocletian and Ignatius, Cyril and Hypatia, Julian and Basil, Athanasius and Arîus: every party has yielded up its persecutors and its martyrs, its hates and slanders and aspirations and heroisms, to the arms of that great Silence whose secrets they all claimed so loudly to have read. Even the dogmas for which they fought might seem to be dead too. For if Julian and Sallustius, Gregory and John Chrysostom, were to rise again and see the world as it now is, they would probably feel their personal differences melt away in comparison with the vast difference between their world and this. They fought to the death about this credo and that, but the same spirit was in all of them.
Gilbert Murray
There is only one reason to be passionate about a lack of faith—and that is fear,” said Caeden quietly. “Fear that you are wrong. An innate need for others to share your opinion, so that you can be less afraid.” He shook his head. “I do not feel the need to argue, to cajole, to threaten or accuse. If others wish to believe differently, that is no business of mine. I simply do not think that there are gods.
James Islington
The will to succeed should be powerful: The willingness to prepare for success is paramount (KR, 1990)
Kieran Revell
Worse still, he doesn’t know how to follow the piper anymore because it’s a path Tom has lost faith in.And the piper knows it. Tom can see it in his father’s eyes now. And the more he stares, the clearer it becomes.
Melina Marchetta
The beauty of Catholicism is every human being's right.
Matthew Kelly
Believe, my child. Faith is the food of survival.
Tobsha Learner
You didn’t just automatically become a Christian, did you? You weren’t made a Christian by just going to church. Just like you are not made a car by sitting in a garage all day! You have to make a decision.
Corallie Buchanan
But we have seen how brightly light shines in the dark, how sweetly music fills the quiet. All these years you have known only shadow and silence, and we have so much to show you. To save you.We are all worth saving.We cannot ever know, not truly.But we have faith.
Amie Kaufman
Well, see, I think it's that most people don't like that lonely feeling. People don't like looking up and feeling small or lost. That's what I think prayer is all about. It doesn't matter which stories they believe in, they're all doing the same thing, kind of casting a line out to outer space, like there's something out there to connect to. It's like people make themselves part of something bigger that way, and maybe it makes them less afraid.
Craig Silvey
We see them as they cannot, will not, see each other--we see his heart in the way he looks at her; we see her soul calling out for his every touch. It would be so easy if they could only see inside each other as we can.And yet, there is beauty in the way they find each other: slowly, in a fragile dance of sidelong glances and accidental touches. To see them come together, souls binding without knowing each other as we do, without being certain of what the other's heart holds, is to learn something new...Faith.
Amie Kaufman
Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.
Markus Zusak
Belief doesn't rest on proof or existence...it rests on faith...without faith there is nothing.
Colleen McCullough
The difference between faith and insanity is that faith is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence, whereas insanity is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence.
William Harwood
If there has been one overriding change in poetic practice, it is that under the influence of free verse the poets have made a primary virtue out of exactitude and economy of meaning: this has replaced metrical skill as the first thing the poet tunes to.
Martin Langford
It is our fate to give ourselves most lavishlyto those who'd rather not be burdened with the gift
Rodney Hall
Jen's Mum Will WriteJen's mum writes advertising copy.She specializes in white goods:washing machines, dryers, fridges,freezers, dishwashers.She hates these applianceshulkingin corners,power-hungry and fractious.One day, she will have a wood stove,and she'll write about things that matter-she will write about birth and death,about love and the absence of love,about fathers and children,about mothers and daughters,about lovers and friends.She'll write about the whole goddamnwonderful, awful businessof loving and being loved
Margaret Wild
If you can't beat em: Poem.
David Rowe
The one who pulls the puppet strings knows fairytales can heal.
Sally Odgers
If you are the lantern, I am the flame;If you are the lake, then I am the rain;If you are the desert, I am the sea;If you are the blossom, I am the bee;If you are the fruit, then I am the core;If you are the rock, then I am the ore;If you are the ballad, I am the word;If you are the sheath, then I am the sword.
Cecilia Dart-Thornton
Stani walks in later, glaring at them both.“Bloody bastards. One minute punching each other, next minute reading poetry. What’s wrong with everyone this week?”Tom can tell that
Melina Marchetta
How they had dreamed together, he and she... how they had planned, and laughed, and loved. They had lived for a while in the very heart of poetry.
Elizabeth von Arnim
what if I fall? oh, my darling, but if you fly?
Erin Hanson
The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.
J.M. Coetzee