Gerald Murnane > Quotes

“I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world. I seem to have sensed from the first that to read fiction was to make available for myself a new kind of space. In that space, a version of myself was free to move among places and personages the distinguishing features of which were the feelings they caused to arise in me rather than their seeming appearance, much less their possible resemblance to places or persons in the world where I sat reading.”
― Gerald Murnane

“During my sixteen years as a teacher of writing, I removed many adverbs and adverbial phrases from students' writing. I decided long ago that a writer who needlessly modifies words is either a nervous writer who does not believe in the worth of what they are writing or a vain writer who wants to be seen as discriminating and sensitive to nuances or meaning.”
― Gerald Murnane

“How might a man reorder his conduct if he could be assured that the worth of a perception, a memory, a supposition, was enhanced rather than diminished by its being inexplicable to others? And what could a man not accomplish, freed from any obligation to search for so-called truths apart from those demonstrated by his search for a truth peculiar to him?”
― Gerald Murnane, The Plains

“Soon after I left university, I came up with another definition of a literary critic or would be critic: someoone who uses churlish towards the end of an article or review.”
― Gerald Murnane

“In all the world there has never been, there is not, and there will never be any such thing as time. There is only place. What people call time is only place after place. Eternity is here already, and it has no mystery about it; eternity is just another name for this endless scenery where we wander from one place to another.”
― Gerald Murnane, Velvet Waters

“I read once that certain musical compositions (by Bach? by Beethoven? I forget) sounded like the efforts of the human soul to explain itself to God. If ever I find my perfect combination of brown and lilac, I’ll feel as though I’ve thus explained myself.”
― Gerald Murnane, Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf

“...our joys and pleasures are only a compromise between our wants and our circumstances.”
― Gerald Murnane, The Plains

“The details of what we call our lives go sometimes to form patterns of meaning not unlike those to be found in our preferred sort of fiction.”
― Gerald Murnane

“Every plainsman knows he has to find his place. The man who stays in his native district wishes he had arrived there after a long journey. And the man who travels begins to fear that he may not find a fitting end to his journey. I've spent my life trying to see my own place as a journey I never made.”
― Gerald Murnane, The Plains

“true fiction is more likely to include what was overlooked or ignored or barely seen or felt at the time of its occurrences but comes continually to mind ten or twenty years afterwards not on account of its having long ago provoked passion or pain but because of its appearing to be part of a pattern of meaning that extends over much of a lifetime”
― Gerald Murnane, A Million Windows

“I can’t imagine anything more shallow or unsatisfying than the cult of realism in fiction that all one wants to do is to write about surfaces and words that people say, the looks on people’s faces, the clothes they’re wearing. When I think of the word fiction I think of someone at a desk, grappling with what are largely unseen, what I call the invisible world or the world of the mind. Fiction starts and for me never gets away from the realm of the mind and even when I read I can never forget that what I am reading is the product of a human hand and that behind what I’m reading is a human voice and I hear that voice in the sentences and phrases I read and being a curious human being I visualize, if I haven’t seen a photograph of the author, I visualize the possessor of that voice.”
― Gerald Murnane

“If, in the further reaches of some or another remote corridor in an immense house of two or, perhaps, three storeys, and behind some or another door that remains mostly closed but in sight of a window overlooking some or another tract of far-reaching landscape of mostly level grassy countryside with low hills or a line of trees in the distance, a certain man at his desk, on some or another day of sunshine with scattered clouds, were to spurn the predictable words and phrases of the many writers of fiction who have reported of this or that male character that he once fell in love with this or that female character, and if that same man, after striving as neither I, the author of this sentence, nor even the most discerning reader of the sentence, have or has striven nor will ever strive, in late afternoon, and at about the time when the rays of the declining sun might have caused the pane in the window of his room to seem to a traveller on a distant road like a spot of golden oil, had found in his heart, or wherever such things are to be found, the words best fitted to suggest what he seemed to have felt long before, on a certain hot afternoon, in a distant inland city, and whether he had simply kept those words in mind or whether he had actually written them, either as notes for a work of fiction that he might one day write or as part of an actual work of fiction, then I do not doubt that the words would have been to the effect that a certain boy, a mere child, while he watched unobserved a certain girl, a mere child, whose name he did not know and who had almost certainly never had sight of him, wished for the means to inform her that he was worthy of trust.”
― Gerald Murnane, A Million Windows

“I consider myself a student of colours and shades and hues and tints. Crimson lake, burnt umber, ultramarine … I was too clumsy as a child to paint with my moistened brush the scenery that I would have liked to bring into being. I preferred to leave untouched in their white metallic surroundings my rows of powdery rectangles of water-colours, to read aloud one after another of the tiny printed names of the coloured rectangles, and to let each colour seem to soak into each word of its name or even into each syllable of each word of each name so that I could afterwards call to mind an exact shade or hue from an image of no more than black letters on a white ground.

Deep cadmium, geranium lake, imperial purple, parchment … after the last of our children had found employment and had moved out of our home, my wife and I were able to buy for ourselves things that had previously been beyond our means. I bought my first such luxury, as I called it, in a shop selling artists’ supplies. I bought there a complete set of coloured pencils made by a famous maker of pencils in England: a hundred and twenty pencils, each stamped with gold lettering along its side and having at its end a perfectly tapered wick. The collection of pencils is behind me as I write these words. It rests near the jars of glass marbles and the kaleidoscope mentioned earlier. None of the pencils has ever been used in the way that most pencils are used, but I have sometimes used the many-striped collection in order to confirm my suspicion as a child that each of what I called my long-lost moods might be recollected and, perhaps, preserved if only I could look again at the precise shade or hue that had become connected with the mood – that had absorbed, as it were, or had been permeated with, one or more of the indefinable qualities that constitute what is called a mood or a state of feeling. During the weeks since I first wrote in the earlier pages of this report about the windows in the church of white stone, I have spent every day an increasing amount of time in moving my pencils to and fro among the hollow spaces allotted to them in their container. I seem to recall that I tried sometimes, many years ago, to move my glass marbles from place to place on the carpet near my desk with the vague hope that some or another chance arrangement of them would restore to me some previously irretrievable mood. The marbles, however, were too variously coloured, and each differed too markedly from the other. Their colours seemed to vie, to compete. Or, a single marble might suggest more than I was in search of: a whole afternoon in my childhood or a row of trees in a backyard when I had wanted back only a certain few moments when my face was brushed by a certain few leaves. Among the pencils are many differing only subtly from their neighbours. Six at least I might have called simply red if I had not learned long ago their true names. With these six, and with still others from each side of them, I often arrange one after another of many possible sequences, hoping to see in the conjectured space between some or another unlikely pair a certain tint that I have wanted for long to see.”
― Gerald Murnane, Border Districts

“There must have been many a man who knew, without leaving his own narrow district of the plains, that his heart enclosed every land he could have travelled to;”
― Gerald Murnane, The Plains

“Now, what is the comparative loudness of a man's flicking the corners of a few banknotes in the middle of his room with the same man's pissing furiously from a bursting bladder into a stainless-steel sink in the corner of his room nearest to a pair of huddled, listening females?”
― Gerald Murnane

“They supposed that their tinted papers showed something of what a man saw apart from himself--something they called the visible world. But they had never considered where that world must lie. They fondled their scraps of paper and admired the stains and blotches seemingly fixed there. But did they know that all the while the great tide of daylight was ebbing away from all they looked at and pouring through the holes in their faces into a profound darkness? If the visible world was anywhere, it was somewhere in that darkness--an island lapped by the boundless ocean of the visible.”
― Gerald Murnane, The Plains

“no film could show more than those sights that a man's eyes rested on when he had given up the effort to observe.”
― Gerald Murnane, The Plains

“As a reader of texts intended to explain the mind, I failed because the words and phrases in front of my eyes gave rise only to the poorest sort of image. Reading about our minds or the mind...I supposed the endless-seeming landscapes of my own thoughts and feelings must have been a paradise by comparison with the drab sites where others located their selves or their personalities or whatever they called their mental territories. And so, I decided long ago to take no further interest in the theoretical and to study instead the actual, which was for me the seeming scenery behind everything I did or thought or read.”
― Gerald Murnane, Border Districts

“I can only say that I sense about each of them a quiet dedication to proving that the plains are not what many plainsmen take them for. They are not, that is, a vast theatre that adds significance to the events enacted within it. Nor are they an immense field for explorers of every kind. They are simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings.”
― Gerald Murnane, The Plains

“They could foresee another morning when they walked inside from the sunlight and began to drink seriously and steadily until all the baffling brightness of the world was only a glowing horizon at the far edge of their deep private twilight”
― Gerald Murnane, The Plains

“What might not follow, they ask themselves, if there should be nothing more substantial in all our experience than those discoveries that seem too slight to signify anything apart from their own brief occurrence? How might a man re-order his conduct if he could be assured that the worth of a perception, a memory, a supposition, was enhanced rather than diminished by its being inexplicable to others? And what could a man not accomplish, freed from any obligation to search for socalled truths apart from those demonstrated by his search for a truth peculiar to him?”
― Gerald Murnane, The Plains

“κάθε άνθρωπος στα βάθη της καρδιάς του είναι ταξιδιώτης σε ένα αχανές τοπίο”
― Gerald Murnane, The Plains

“My first ten years were spent in a suburb of Melbourne so quiet that I believed no people could have survived on the far side of their trimmed privet hedges unless their wardrobes and cupboards were stuffed with rubber or clay or painted tokens of another world altogether, a world that poked up into Melbourne in the dark corners of bedrooms and the shadowy spaces under fruit-trees and behind fowl sheds in backyards wholly hidden from the street. On many a Sunday afternoon when my mother took me on long trips by tram to visit some aunt or great-aunt and I had to sit for the first half-hour in the front room, I looked around me for some detail of a painted landscape on the wall or some gesture made by a porcelain figure in the crystal-cabinet or some pattern in the threads of an anti-macassar that seemed the nearest sign of the other world. Then, when I was allowed to go outside , I would always find a certain kind of place - the patch of rotting leaves under the treefern on the blind side of the house; the clump of arum lilies between the garden shed and the back fence; the corner of lawn just beyond the last flagstone in a path that had seemed likely to lead to something much more definite. I would stand in that place and stare, and wonder what word I had to learn the meaning of or what other person I had to turn myself into before I could recognise the doorway that must have been somewhere just in front of me.”
― Gerald Murnane, Landscape with Landscape

“While I was writing the previous paragraph, I was prompted again to look at the photograph of the young actress and to compare that image with the image presently in my mind, but then I recalled that I had sold most of my books before moving from the city where I had lived for most of my life to this township near the border.
I had sold the books because this house where I now live is a mere cottage with space for only a few hundred books. I had sold the books also in order to keep faith with myself. For some years past, I had claimed that whatever deserved to be remembered from my experiences as a reader of books was, in fact, safely remembered. I had claimed also the converse of this: whatever I had forgotten from my experiences as a reader of books had not deserved to be remembered.”
― Gerald Murnane, Border Districts

“Σκοπός ενός εξερευνητή είναι να συνάγει την ύπαρξη μιας γης πέρα από τη γνωστή γη. Το κατά πόσο βρίσκει αυτή τη γη και φέρνει νέα από αυτήν είναι δευτερεύον. Μπορεί να επιλέξει να χαθεί εκεί μέσα για πάντα και να προσθέσει άλλη μία στο άθροισμα των ανεξερεύνητων γαιών.”
― Gerald Murnane, The Plains

“I do not care to inspect too closely those other lives lived by men who might almost have been myself”
― Gerald Murnane, The Plains

“I've spent much of my reading life among hedgerows and by-roads. The trouble is I've tended to shy away from certain writers just because their houses of fiction are on the main roads.”
― Gerald Murnane

“A man can know his place and yet never try to reach it.”
― Gerald Murnane, The Plains

“Readers and audiences on the plains were seldom impressed by outbursts of emotion or violent conflicts or sudden calamities. They supposed that the artists who presented such things had been beguiled by the noises of crowds or the profusions of shapes and surfaces in the foreshortened landscapes of the world beyond the plains. The plainsman’s heroes, in life and in art, were such as the man who went home every afternoon for thirty years to an unexceptional house with neat lawns and listless shrubs and sat late into the night deciding on the route of a journey that he might have followed for thirty years only to arrive at the place where he sat—or the man who would never take even the one road that led away from his isolated farmhouse for fear that he would not recognise the place if he saw it from the distant vantage points that others used.”
― Gerald Murnane, The Plains: Text Classics

“... with their afternoon's work done and settled themselves at the bar to achieve their lifelong task of shaping from uneventful days in a flat landscape the substance of myth”
― Gerald Murnane , The Plains