David Malouf > Quotes

“What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“Words his soul danced to.”
― David Malouf

“Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that which drives us on to what we must finally become… This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six. I am there.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“I knew that the world around you is only uninteresting if you can't see what is really going on. The place you come from is always the most exotic place you'll ever encounter because it is the only place where you recognise how many secrets and mysteries there are in people's lives”
― David Malouf

“So these things happen, deep in our lives. We do not speak of them. We hide them even from ourselves, but they do not leave us.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.”
― David Malouf, The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World

“We are free at last to believe in ourselves.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“... history is forever unfinished, forever in process; endless because our needs are endless.”
― David Malouf, The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World

“I now have of a life that stretches beyond the limits of measurable time.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“Scarlet! It is the first colour I have seen in months. Or so it seems. Scarlet. A little wild poppy, of a red so sudden it made my blood stop. I kept saying the word over and over to myself, scarlet, as if the word, like the colour, had escaped me till now, and just saying it would keep the little windblown flower in sight.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“Everything I ever valued before this was valued only because it was useless, because time spent upon it was not demanded but freely given, because to play is to be free. Free is not a word that exists here, I think, in their language. Nothing here is free of its own nature, its own law.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“Or does not knowing make him free?”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“That is what life meant, a unique presence, and it was essential in every creature.”
― David Malouf

“Always to be pushing out like this, beyond what I know cannot be the limits - what else should a man's life be?”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely… It is simply the most ordinary place in the world…It was so shabby and makeshift … a place where poetry could never occur.”
― David Malouf, Johnno

“I have heard no word of my own language; I am rendered dumb.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“So many things were new. Everything changed. The past would not hold and could not be held.”
― David Malouf, Fly Away Peter

“I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.”
― David Malouf, Johnno

“Shy Gifts

Shy gifts that come to us from a world that may not
even know we’re here. Windfalls, scantlings.

Breaking a bough like breathy flute-notes, a row
of puffed white almond-blossom, the word in hiding

among newsprint that has other news to tell.
In a packed aisle at the supermarket, I catch

the eye of a wordless one-year-old, whale-blue,
unblinking. It looks right through me, recognising

what? Wisely mistrustful but unwisely
impulsive as we are, we take these givings

as ours and meant for us — why else so leap
to receive them? — and go home lighter

of step to the table set, the bed turned down, the book
laid open under the desk-lamp, pages astream

with light like angels' wings, arched for take-off.”
― David Malouf, Earth Hour

“A life wasn't for anything. It simply was.”
― David Malouf, Fly Away Peter

“What drew him back was something altogether more personal, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing on the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone that he knew would never appear. He had long understood that one of his selves, the earliest and most vulnerable, had never left this place, and this original and clearest view of things could be recovered only through what had first come to him in the glow of its ordinary light and weather...it was the light they appeared in that was the point, and that at least had not changed.”
― David Malouf, Dream Stuff

“But here we call it Spring, when a young man’s fancy turns,
fitfully, lightly, to idling in the sun,
to touching in the dark. And the old man's?

To worms in their garden box; stepping aside
a moment in a poem that will remember,
fitfully, who made it and the discord

and stammer, and change of heart and catch of breath
it sprang from. A bending down
lightly to touch the earth.”
― David Malouf, Earth Hour

“Still the fact remains, he had me hooked. As he had, of course, from the beginning. I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met.”
― David Malouf, Johnno

“Enemies, like friends, told you who you were.”
― David Malouf, Fly Away Peter

“The prospect of going home again scared them. They couldn't imagine how they could ever settle to it. How they could just walk around the streets and pretend to be normal, look women in the eye again after what they had done and seen, ride on trams, sit at a table with a white cloth, and control their hands and just slowly eat. It was the little things that scared them. The big things you could hide in. It was little ones that gave a man away.”
― David Malouf

“We are mortals, not gods. We die. Death is our nature. Without that fee paid in advance, the world does not come to us. That is the hard bargain life makes with us — with all of us, every one — and the condition we share. And for that reason, if no other, we should have pity for one another's losses. For the sorrows that must come sooner or later to each one of us, in a world we enter only on mortal terms.”
― David Malouf, Ransom