Ruth Park > Quotes

“You're a hidjus old pollywobble!”
― Ruth Park, The Muddle-Headed Wombat

“The announcer, in milky tones, rolled out the commercial; it was all about some sort of washing powder that made laundry days a mere frolic in the backyard”
― Ruth Park, The Harp in the South

“And when he got home he started on Mumma. He hated her then, because in her fatness and untidiness and drabness she reminded him of what he himself was when he was sober.”
― Ruth Park, The Harp in the South

“What has being a girl to do with anything if a person in properly qualified?' ... 'It's what you call prejudice,' she said.”
― Ruth Park

“Having a baby is different from all the ordinary ways of being hurt. it's worth it all. Other pain isn't worth anything, but that is.”
― Ruth Park, The Harp in the South

“Experience soon taught me never to write about anything important to me - the Māoris, animals, the unemployed men, the empty boarded-up houses that frightened me. The subsequent trampling of my sensibilities would have destroyed me. Soon everything I wrote came only from my imagination.”
― Ruth Park, A Fence Around the Cuckoo

“Then she said, with piteous defiance, "If I could love her, the Good Lord could, and he won't be too hard on an old lady who didn't have an easy life.”
― Ruth Park, The Harp in the South

“Sweeties were a breakfast cereal. They did not snap,crackle or pop, or do anything the more talented cereals did.”
― Ruth Park, A Power of Roses

“Writing is a passion I have never understood, yet a storyteller is all I have ever wanted to be.”
― Ruth Park

“They're only doctors," he said, "You're just another woman having a baby to them."

"Yes," stammered Roie, "But I'm not just another woman to me.”
― Ruth Park, Poor Man's Orange

“Elva had said nothing to anyone. She prayed earnestly that she was "all right", explaining over and over again to God what the doctor had said, and how she couldn't properly look after the children she already had. Elva liked to pray in front of a statue similar to the one in her mother's living-room. She was not praying to the statue, but it was a kind of magical doll that kept her thoughts focussed on the Being to whom she prayed.”
― Ruth Park, Serpent's Delight

“I've got lots of brains," said Wombat. "You listen to them rattle."

He shook his head and it rattled beautifully.”
― Ruth Park, The Muddle-Headed Wombat

“But somewhere in his character he was flimsy. Jer saw him bowling forever round the State, like one of those uncanny bundles of dry grass and thorns, a rolypoly, rolling this way and that before the wind until it fetched up against barbed wire and fell to pieces.”
― Ruth Park, Missus

“In those days of the second World War it was still widely believed that women who had just delivered could reasonably be expected to be off their heads. ‘Yes, dear,’ these meek women said, with a certain mournful importance. ‘I was outa me mind. Terrible, really. All me milk went to the brain. I suppose it curdles, like.”
― Ruth Park, Fishing in the Styx: Text Classics

“This was the place where the Darcys lived - Plymouth Street, Surry Hills, Sydney, in an unlucky house which the landlord had renumbered from Thirteen to Twelve-and-a-Half.”
― Ruth Park, The Harp in the South

“Rory had a much better start in life than Anne had had. He was not only healthy and sociable, but so well-dressed that his father addressed him as Bub Brummell.”
― Ruth Park, Fishing in the Styx

“[a]nd the Pig Man came in from Waitomo and swore that if Louisa didn't marry him he'd damn well vote Labour at the next election.
"And I don't care if the country does go to rack and ruin," he said.”
― Ruth Park, Dear Hearts and Gentle People