Patrick White > Quotes

“كانت في أسعد حالاتها وهي منغلقة الى ذاتها بأفكارها، وكان هذا قوام صلابتها”
― Patrick White, فوس

“من الواضح أن الصحاري تُفضل أن تُقاوم التاريخ وأن تُطور سطوره”
― Patrick White, فوس

“العظماء يستثنون من الواجبات البديهية”
― Patrick White, فوس

“If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.”
― Patrick White, Voss

“To understand the stars would spoil their appearance.”
― Patrick White, Voss

“Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty.”
― Patrick White, The Tree of Man

“Life is full of alternatives but no choice.”
― Patrick White, The Aunt's Story

“I expect we are all jealous of the women in their past, but how much less exciting if the women had not kept the bed warm.”
― Patrick White, The Twyborn Affair

“She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.”
― Patrick White, Voss

“To make yourself, it is also necessary to destroy yourself.”
― Patrick White, Voss

“The map? I will first make it.”
― Patrick White, Voss

“There's nothing so inhuman as a human being.”
― Patrick White, The Vivisector

“Human relationships are vast as deserts: they demand all daring, she seemed to suggest. ”
― Patrick White, Voss

“هذا الثمل وذلك المجنون وذلك الخائن هم موجودون في كل مكان وزمان”
― Patrick White, فوس

“Reason finally holds a gun at its head - and does not always miss.”
― Patrick White, Riders in the Chariot

“She had begun to read in the beginning as a protection from the frightening and unpleasant things. She continued because, apart from the story, literature brought with it a kind of gentility for which she craved.”
― Patrick White, The Tree of Man

“They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn't notice he was touched, because he wouldn't have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.”
― Patrick White, The Vivisector

“I am compelled into this country.”
― Patrick White, Voss

“If I have not lost my mind I can sometimes hear it preparing to defect”
― Patrick White

“Life doesn't end on the kitchen floor while there is the will to dance.”
― Patrick White, Three Uneasy Pieces

“The mystery of life is not salved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.”
― Patrick White

“It was Sunday, and Mumma had gone next door with Lena and the little ones. Under the pepper tree in the yard Pa was sorting, counting, the empty bottles he would sell back: the bottles going clink clink as Pa stuck them in the sack. The fowls were fluffing in the dust and sun: that crook-neck white pullet Mumma said she would hit on the head if only she had the courage to; but she hadn't.”
― Patrick White, The Vivisector

“His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.”
― Patrick White, Voss

“As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross.”
― Patrick White

“Where have you been, Theodora?," Mrs Goodman asked.
"Walking, Mother."
"And whom did you see?"
Mrs Goodman flung her grammar like a stone.
"I did not see a cat," said Theodora.
Mrs Goodman looked at her daughter, who giggled before she left the room.”
― Patrick White, The Aunt's Story

“No animal suffers worse than a human being.”
― Patrick White, The Vivisector

“The worst thing about love between human beings is that when you are prepared to love them they don't want it; when they do its you who can't bear the idea.”
― Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm

“I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while the callous see us as dispensable objects, like broken furniture or dead flowers. For the young we scarcely exist unless we are unavoidable members of the same family, farting, slobbering, perpetually mislaying teeth and bifocals.”
― Patrick White, Three Uneasy Pieces

“At times his arrogance did resolve itself into simplicity, though it was difficult, especially for strangers, to distinguish these occasions.”
― Patrick White, Voss

“Lal Wyburd would naturally have interpreted as selfishness every floundering attempt anybody made to break out of the straitjacket and recover a sanity which must have been theirs in the beginning, and might be theirs again in the end. That left the long stretch of the responsible years, when you were lunging in your madness after love, money, position, possessions, while an inkling persisted, sometimes even a certainty descended: of a calm in which the self had been stripped, if painfully, of its human imperfections.”
― Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm