“You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It’s just a fact of life.”
— Bill Bryson
“One’s child is always one’s child no matter what age they might be. You worry when your child makes a noise, when he doesn’t. It’s a terrible kind of love. Terrible.”
— Chris Womersley
“I guess having one hundred and four condoms full of heroin in your guts and the thought of a firing squad in your head make will make most things seem insignificant.”
— S.A. Tawks
“A story is a wondrous invention.”
— Chris Womersley
“We adapt to our sorrows, I suppose, as unpleasant as they might be. One cannot weep forever. One simply runs dry of tears.”
— Chris Womersley
“To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss.”
— Chris Womersley
“After all, the girl actually had faith in something, which was more than most people had in these dark times. It was wrong to destroy it.”
— Chris Womersley
“Vast skies in the Australian desertwaves that don’t movewe slide surf glide like condors”
— Martin Stepek
“I remember that there was a time when I believed that a government and its departments were there to meet the needs, to understand the needs, and to act on the needs of the people for whom they have taken responsibility. It took me some time to question why it was in relation to [Aboriginal] people that they did not meet the needs, or take the steps, that responsible government demands. Why do they not provide the simple basics in the ways that work for us? Why not? There has never been an honest answer to this.”
— Rom Watangu
“The ability to engage the reader, to stir feelings deep within their being, is the ultimate goal of erotic fiction. When the reader takes the place of the characters in my story, I have succeeded”
— Sasha Holden
“My biggest problem is that my flight is to depart from Denpasar International Airport in Indonesia, where the penalty for drug trafficking is death by firing squad.”
— S.A. Tawks
“The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it.”
— Bill Bryson
“I am compelled into this country.”
— Patrick White
“I can make you feel, and I can scare you for real.-Misty Lee”
— Misty Lee
“I am halfway through Hillary Clinton’s latest called “Living History”…pretty lighthearted on the scale…unlike David Hick’s autobiography…I had to skip a couple of hundred pages in the middle of that one because it was too distressing for me to read. Undoubtedly yours will be the same…I will read the beginning, skip all the awful bit in the middle and read your happy ever after bit at the end.”
— Paige Garland
“In this century, the Australian Century, Australia will also have an opportunity to achieve extraordinary feats. Just as the United States dominates world affairs with less than five per cent of the global population, Australia too can make a lasting impression with its own limited demographics. The rise of the global middle class is Australia’s pathway to exceptionalism.”
— Asher Judah
“I didn’t wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly”
— Nevil Shute
“it was so beautiful’, he said. ‘the Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. you’ve got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains….we used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvellous place it would be to come to for a holiday. however terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if its beautiful.”
— Nevil Shute
“People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. they don’t know what it was like, not being in a camp.”
— Nevil Shute
“Lucinda might sneak from her own house at midnight to place a wager somewhere else, but she dared not touch the pack that lay in her own sideboard. She knew how passionate he had become about his ‘weakness.’ She dared not even ask him how it was he had reversed his opinions on the matter. But, oh, how she yearned to discuss it with him, how much she wished to deal a hand on a grey wool blanket. There would be no headaches then, only this sweet consummation of their comradeship.But she said not a word. And although she might have her ‘dainty’ shoes tossed to the floor, have her bare toes quite visible through her stockings, have a draught of sherry in her hand, in short appear quite radical, she was too timid, she thought, too much a mouse, to reveal her gambler’s heart to him. She did not like this mouselike quality. As usual, she found herself too careful, too held in.Once she said: ‘I wish I had ten sisters and a big kitchen to laugh in.’Her lodger frowned and dusted his knees.She thought: He is as near to a sister as I am likely to get, but he does not understand.She would have had a woman friend so they could brush each other’s hair, and just, please God, put aside this great clanking suit of ugly armor.She kept her glass dreams from him, even whilst she appeared to talk about them. He was an admiring listener, but she only showed him the opaque skin of her dreams–window glass, the price of transporting it, the difficulties with builders who would not pay their bills inside six months. He imagined this was her business, and of course it was, but all the things she spoke of were a fog across its landscape which was filled with such soaring mountains she would be embarrassed to lay claim to them. Her true ambition, the one she would not confess to him, was to build something Extraordinary and Fine from glass and cast iron. A conservatory, but not a conservatory. Glass laced with steel, spun like a spider web–the idea danced around the periphery of her vision, never long enough to be clear. When she attempted to make a sketch, it became diminished, wooden, inelegant. Sometimes, in her dreams, she felt she had discovered its form, but if she had, it was like an improperly fixed photograph which fades when exposed to daylight. She was wise enough, or foolish enough, to believe this did not matter, that the form would present itself to her in the end.”
— Peter Carey
“He was tender with her. He wiped her eyelids with his handkerchief, not noticing how soiled it was. It was stained with ink, crumpled, stuck together. Her lids were large and tender and the handkerchief was stiff, not nearly soft enough. He moistened a corner in his mouth. He was painfully aware of the private softness of her skin, of how the eyes trembled beneath their coverings. He dried the tears with an affection, a particularity, that had never been exercised before. It was a demonstration of ‘nature.’ He was a birth-wet foal rising to his feet.”
— Peter Carey
“But now she could not bear the way she sounded. She was not a person anyone could love….And thus fled to her room. There she wept, bitterly, an ugly sound punctuated by great gulps. She could not stop herself. She could hear his footsteps in the passage outside. He walked up and down, up and down.’Come in,’ she prayed. ‘Oh dearest, do come in.’But he did not come in. He would not come in. This was the man she had practically contracted to give away her fortune to. He offered to marry her as a favour and then he would not even come into her room.Later, she could smell him make himself a sweet pancake for his lunch. She thought this a childish thing to eat, and selfish, too. If he were a gentleman he would now come to her room and save her from the prison her foolishness had made for her. He did not come. She heard him pacing in his room.”
— Peter Carey
“To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.”
— Peter Carey
“And it’s hard to hate someone once you understand them.”
— Lucy Christopher
“Then, as she turned in a majestic arc for home, a beautiful sunrise appeared on the horizon, as golden and perfect as the very first ray of sun at the beginning of time.”
— Samantha Wood
“One night a flock of red-tailed black cockatoos break the quiet as they charge up from the creek, right over the homestead, then down the hill towards Clem’s house.’They’re my favourite, you know, of all the birds, they’re the best,’ comes Tom’s raspy whisper. ‘I know Dad,’ says Clem. ‘You always say.”They’re majestic, dramatic. You wouldn’t argue with one.”
— Nicole Sinclair
“What is it that Australians celebrate on 26 January? Significantly, many of them are not quite sure what event they are commemorating. Their state of mind fascinated Egon Kisch, an inquisitive Czech who was in Sydney at the end of January 1935. Kisch has a place in our history as the victim, or hero, of a ludicrous chapter in the history of our immigration laws. He had been invited to Melbourne for a Congress against War and Fascism, and was forbidden to land by order of the attorney-general, R. G. Menzies. He had jumped overboard, broken his leg, gone to hospital, failed a dictation test in Gaelic and been sentenced to imprisonment and deportation. When the High Court declared Gaelic not a language, Kisch was free to hobble on our soil…”
— K.S. Inglis
“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
“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
“Archbishop Mannix was possessed of the clearest intellect I have ever encountered. He prayed regularly for five hours and more each day, this in the midst of a life of intense activity. When he was well over ninety, I once asked him about the precise quality of the Faith which had sustained him. His answer? ‘My Faith has always been like a thin silken thread, fraying perpetually at the brink of a precipice over which I hang. Yet the thread has never snapped.”
— Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria