QUOTES FROM AUSTRALIAN NOVELS
1. I suppose that in a culture of intense specialization in smaller and smaller fractions, it is normal for one man to be ignorant of what is the whole life of others.
George Turner Down There in Darkness
2. Jim had found himself defending whatever it was in him that Wizzer rejected, and discovered that he needed this sudden, unexpected confrontation to see who he was and what he had to defend. Enemies, like friends, told you who you were.
David Malouf Fly Away Peter
3. It was at first the voice of a child, and then, with hardly a change of tone, it was the voice of a querulous old man, who had asked for little and had been given less and spent his whole life demanding his due.
David Malouf Fly Away Peter.
4. He now saw that his non-drinking personality too was not particularly different from his drinking personality. He still said dumb things, and if relaxed, could still be reasonably spontaneous, outrageous, playful.
Frank Moorhouse Forty-Seventeen
5. After coming to terms with the imperfect self it is then necessary to come to terms with the imperfect world, to calculate how much of the imperfection of self and the world you have to accommodate without restlessness, without engaging in ineffective efforts to change, efforts which are more protest and despair than hoped-for interventions.
Frank Moorhouse Forty-Seventeen
6. He saw the seventy-year old Edith on the platform with a piece of paper in her hand, giggling in front of the commission people. He wondered about the image she had of herself-was it unsynchronised with her age? Could she still at times see herself as a giggling schoolgirl?
Frank Moorhouse Forty-Seventeen
7. What's the point of dreams if we can't understand them?
Frank Moorhouse Forty-Seventeen.
8. Physical and mental superiority does not give you the right to show contempt for those you feel are inferior to you.
Jack Heath The Lab
9. So much for those who cannot remember the past being condemned to repeat it-what about those who remember the past all too well and are still condemned to repeat it?
Helen Hodgman Passing Remarks
10. You never know what's up, what goes on in the shielded darkness of coupledom, no matter how well you think you know those involved.
Helen Hodgman Passing Remarks
11. You know how it is when you break up with someone and they vanish from your life. To all intents and purposes they might as well be dead, don't you reckon? I do. It's weird. Like having a cemetery on the outskirts of your mind.
Helen Hodgman Passing Remarks
12. How could one phone call put such a cold shadow into the mild sunny spring October day?
Claire McNab Fatal Reunion
13. Life wasn't like that. tidy and satisfying; it was messy and confusing and people loved and hated in ways that you couldn't control.
Claire McNab Fatal Reunion.
14. They had an awkward fragmented unsatisfying conversation where Carol neither said what she wanted to say, nor heard what she wanted to hear.
Claire McNab Fatal Reunion
15. Older hands are either feverishly elated or else downcast, energetic with success or hopeless with lack of it (nothing can tire the former, everything exhausts the latter).
Rodney Halls Just Relations
16. For the Polish, Jews were now statues and ornaments and baubles. The dead ones were a boom for the tourist industry.
Lily Brett Too Many Men
17. I have always been struck by the name 'Diemen' which is so close to the word 'demon', and by the presence in the subsequent name, 'Tasmania' of the word 'mania'. The names evoke a demon madness that I am inclined to think is present here.
Carmel Bird The Bluebird Cafe
18. It's hard to know, when a man takes up land, how much in the end is owed to his making and how much is owed to the land.
Hugh Atkinson Grey's Valley The Legend.
19. I'm not very good at being the modest wife deferring to the great man and his colleagues. I have a few ideas of my own I'd like to air sometimes!
Morris West The World is Made of Glass
20. Does any women ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?
Geraldine Brooks Caleb's Crossings
21. Gericault felt a sudden rush of loathing for this father of his, forever keeping a tight control over any hint of misrule with his stipends and provisions, bank accounts and payrolls, and now tidying the mess created by his son.
Arabella Edge The God of Spring
22. This what what it was like, she thought, to be perpetually in someone's debt...it really was no better than owing money to the bank. True, it did not carry actual interest, but it was worse in that it was a family debt, and carried it's own particular interest and penalties for default.
Catherine Gaskin The Charmed Circle
23. It was not easy to be married to a man who seemed able to charm almost any woman he fastened his attention on.
Catherine Gaskin The Charmed Circle
24. After suggesting that all actors should have a little bit of the child in them, he said that relaxation was everything, that timing was everything, and that we must whenever possible observe people on buses. Presumably the people we actually knew weren't the kind of people we would want to look at.
Alexandra Long The Year of Christina Cleaves
25. I curse our fantastic days that have to have things done with them. They are too big a responsibility.
Alexandra Long The Year of Christina Cleaves
26. Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of PowerPoint slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies.
Max Barry Company
27. What you really want, following your sacking is for the company to undergo a quick, public financial implosion directly traceable to your departure.
Max Barry Company
28. She was trying, as during her walk through the lane, to get over the terrible disappointment she had just had. And of course, since she had never spoken about it to anyone she could not talk of it now.
Elizabeth Jolley The Newspaper of Claremont Street.
29. Tears ran down his cheek as he fought to control the desire to smash Geldenhuis, to take his club and pulp his head for all the hurt and suffering his kind brought upon others. But Peekay knew that the spirit of an evil dragon slain in this way simply enters the heart of its slayer where it eats from the inside to destroy him.
Bryce Courtenay Tandia
30. Mostly we drowns our listening with the need to hear our own voices. No man finds a voice sweeter to his hear than his own. But if you want to know what's in a man's soul, listen to him, listen to his silences, they be louder than his words.
Bryce Courtenay Tommo and Hawk
31. Your Family's never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.
M.L. Stedman The Light Between Oceans
32. Love is the opposite of power. That's why we fear it so much.
Gregory David Roberts Shantaram.
33. Now there was a subtext to everything. A dark running undertow that dragged me along. What will I do? What will I do? It whispered on and on. It pulled me, obsessed me, took the color out of everything. Every time I thought of something else, laughed, ran, lay on my bed, it pulled me under--think about me, worry about me, don't forget about me!
Anna Fienberg Borrowed Light
34. There are many different types of singing. There is singing to keep yourself company, which is like talking to yourself only with a tune. There is singing onstage to make other people happy, which requires practice and sweaty palms. And there is sudden singing, which happens when songs rise up, without warning, inside you and there is nothing that you can do but open your mouth and sing them. Karen Foxlee The Anatomy of Wings
QUOTES FROM AUSTRALIAN BOOKS (that are not novels)
1. The cricket bat is more common in Australia than a baseball bat and, maybe would argue, a classier option for dealing with the living dead. You can emulate cricket heroes such as Bradman as you swing the mighty willow to clear a path through the zombie horde. Built to be easy to handle, the size and weight of the bat may be an issue for daily use but nonetheless a stylish-and very gentlemanly-way to face the apocalypse.
DR L Jon Keioskie and Sean Page The Official Zombie Handbook-Australia
2. The fashion towards open plan office layouts is great for building good morale and encouraging a more open and creative corporate culture but in resiting the living dead; it's quite frankly a nightmare.
Dr L Jon Keioskie and Sean Page The Official Zombie Handbook-Australia.
3. Bligh fell short of being a great man, but neither was he a bad man; and the merit of his achievements, both as a navigator and amid the shock of battle (especially at Copenhagen in 1801, under Nelson) must not be overlooked, even though stern history will not permit his errors to be overlooked.
Ernest Scott The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders
4. Write to me constantly; write me pages and volumes. Tell me the dress thou wearest, tell me thy dreams, anything, so do but talk to me and of thyself. When thou art sitting at thy needle and alone, then think of me, my love, and write me the uppermost of thy thoughts. Fill me half a dozen sheets, and send them when thou canst.
Matthew Flinders (to his wife) quoted by Ernest Scott in The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders
5. I was officially a hypocrite. I wanted to blend in and disappear yet be noticed doing it.
Portia De Rossi Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain
6. It annoyed me that people find celebrity so impressive that they have to talk about it. What annoyed me more was that I was impressed.
Portia De Rossi Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain
7. Even if the tabloid headlines pretended to be disapproving of a girl who was supposedly "too thin" I could always detect envy in the text-that in the tone of the article, there was always the underlying element of awe. And I knew the readers were reading it jealously, wishing that they could be just like us-determined, controlled, not needing anything or anyone to feel special or successful; we'd created our own ultimate success.
Portia De Rossi Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain
8. If the growth of nations were comparable to that of human beings one would have to say that Australia is emerging from a difficult adolescence. Our mother country never loved us enough, no matter how many soldiers we sent to fight her wars. We never rebelled like America or India, but this did not endear us to our distant parent. Because we were small we took to sports with a passion, intent on impressing our peers and our elders, but we were still treated with condescension. Finally when the time came to sever our ties with "home" we simply couldn't do it.
John McDonald Federation Australian Art and Society 1901-2001
9. Perhaps, however what I from ignorance deem wonderful is common.
Watkin Tench A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson
10. I seem to spend so much of my time on the inconsequental and I find that looking at monuments worries me. I try too hard with monuments. I read too much before and after; or I worry that I haven't read enough or that I've clouded my mind with historical background and can't "see" the monument for itself
Frank Moorhouse Room Service
11. A few people have been commenting on the blog how it must be nice to have other yachts every once in awhile, but I can't say I really feel like that. Sure, it was nice to chat with them over the radio, to find out where they'd come from and where they are heading to, but I can really be comfortable only when Ella's Pink Lady and I have the ocean completely to ourselves. Every time a bit of land pops up on the chart, it weighs on my mind and almost feels a little claustrophobic!
Jessica Watson True Spirit.
12. It is funny how whenever I was feeling a little too close to losing it, talking to someone could really set me off. I was much better if I just kept it all to myself. You'd think talking would comfort me and make me feel better, but most of the time it made things worse.
Jessica Watson True Spirit
QUOTES FROM EDITORIALS
1. Last Tuesday Yumi Stynes said something stupid. But I ask you, haven't we all?
Giles Hardie "Enough Abuse of Yumi" in the Sydney Morning Herald.
QUOTES FROM INTERVIEWS AND TALK SHOWS
Portia De Rossi on Ellen
2. And even "I'm worried about you" kind of felt like ..."I'm worried about you. You're too thin" was like love wrapped up in a compliment. You know it's like... she's worried about me, she cares about me. Yet I can't really be too thin. So anything that would suggest that girl is not as in control as she wants to appear to be is a better thing. Because an Anorexic wants control more than anything.
Portia De Rossi on Ellen
3. I think we need to accept that it is not appropriate for anyone to be getting death threats, whether they're politicians, whether they're journalists, whether they work in any profession. If they're human beings we should all be standing up and saying that is not appropriate and we need to be making sure that we've got appropriate boundaries in these discussions.
Kate Ellis on Q and A
4. So I think we need to look at accountability for people who are abusing others rather than, say, removing the victims or blaming the victims and I’ve seen a lot of victim blaming as well. People say, you know, "Ignore the trolls. Just block them," as if it’s as simple as that. And whilst that might work for some people and in some circumstances, you’re really blaming the victim if they don’t do that. You say, oh, you asked for it by, say, re tweeting a message or by responding. And I really strongly believe, and we see this historically, abuse has never been solved by silence ever and it is really damaging, I think, to tell victims of abuse that they need to remain silent or remove themselves from the situation. It’s really blaming them and making them suffer.
Tara Moss on Q and A
QUOTES FROM AUSTRALIAN TV SHOWS
1. Maybe the very hardest part of connecting with anyone is when you have to let them go. And just hope they find a way to come back to you.
Dance Academy
2. Grapevine gossip. You burp in Summer Bay and the whole town thinks you got ulcers by morning.
Home and Away
QUOTES FROM AUSTRALIAN SONGS
You have lost
(Too much love)
To fear, doubt and distrust
(It’s not enough)
You just threw away the key
(To your heart)
Gotye "Hearts a Mess"2. Who's gonna watch your back?
Who's gonna reel you in?
Who'll make surprise attacks?
Who's gonna be there at the end?
Powderfinger Nobody Sees3. I'd like to believe that you love me
I'd like to believe that you care
I'd like to believe you're the one I can trust
Your the one who will always be there
Hunters and Collectors Where Do You Go?4. As you've been moving surely toward me
My soul has comforted and assured me
That in time my heart it will reward me
And that all will be revealed
So I've sat and I've watched an ice-age thaw
Are you the one that I've been waiting for?
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds Are You the One that I've Been Waiting For?6. You’ve gotta get us home right now
There’s no comfort in the cradle where
we sleep
It’s a land of dark and wide
It won’t let us survive for free
You’ve gotta get us home
The Panics Get Us Home 7. Still daylight comes now
But you stay silent
The books you're buried in
Blind your tale
Walk on my dear Stand firm
Don't you show your face
Matt Corby Light Home
