Peter Goldsworthy > Quotes

“We must know when to move on. To search too long for perfection can also paralyse.”
― Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro

“Only the second-rate never make mistakes.”
― Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro

“I never hear you practice."
He smiled: "Only those who are dirty need to wash.”
― Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro

“Even the stars we see
are only a kind of memory,
already dead for years.”
― Peter Goldsworthy, This Goes With That: Poems, 1974-2001

“Can I know that mine was a foolish, innocent world, a world of delusion and feeling and ridiculous dreams - a world of music - and still love it?

Endlessly, effortlessly.”
― Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro

“A constant flickering confetti of butterflies showered the town of Darwin. Designer insects, I think of them now: there was something enormously wasteful, extravagant even, about the profusion of patterns and shapes and brilliant colours.”
― Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro

“I smiled, but internally, unseen, using no visible facial muscles.”
― Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro

“At home, my mother dabbed at her brow with a wet flannel she kept in the fridge for that purpose.”
― Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro

“Even our garden lawn—most domesticated of foliage—needed mowing again almost as soon as it was done … like some lush, green five o’clock shadow.”
― Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro

“My affection for you does not depend on those small things.’
Affection? To hear him admit it, to actually utter words of love, however understated, astonished me.”
― Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro

“To describe the world is always to simplify its texture, to coarsen the weave: to lose the particular in general.”
― Peter Goldsworthy

“I could set from memory a replica of the perfect Still Life she laid out on the table each morning: the carefully folded Advertiser, the two canary yellow hemispheres of grapefruit in their bowls, separated by a more richly yellowed cube of butter; the sky blue milk-jug and matching sugar bowl filled to the brim with their differently textured whitenesses; the pot of tea snug in its knitted navy blue cosy, the steam that rose invisibly from its spout suddenly rendered visible, swirling, where it entered the slanting morning light.”
― Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro