Australian Literature Quotes

“Do not define me by my gender or my socio-economic status, Noah Willis. Do not tell me who I am and do not tell me who society thinks I am and then put me in that box and expect me to stay there. Because, I swear to God, I will climb the hell out of that box and I will take that box you've just put me in and I will use that box to smash your face in until you're nothing more than a freckly, bloodied pulp. You got that, sweet cheeks?”
― Megan Jacobson, Yellow

“I don't believe there is a God", I said fiercely, "and if there is, He's not the merciful being He's always depicted, or He wouldn't be always torturing me for His own amusement.”
― Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career

“There is any amount of love and good in the world, but you must search for it. Being misunderstood is one of the trials we all must bear. I think that even the most common-minded person in the land has inner thoughts and feelings which no one can share with him, and the higher one's organization the more one must suffer in that respect.”
― Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career

“But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was—perhaps rightly—scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century.”
― Thomas Keneally

“Invisible magpies warbled in the plane trees. Softly, gently, never running out of melodic ideas, they perched among the leaves and spun out their endless tales.”
― Helen Garner, Joe Cinque's Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law

“When I returned home soon afterwards, it was with a newly awakened sense of what Australian literature was good for: helping us define ourselves in relation to an Anglo past and American present, for example, or airing the wounds suffered by indigenous Australia, or inhabiting those new frictions that result from our expanding cultural pluralism. Above all, it could teach us to dwell more easily in a landscape that did not accord with the metaphors and myth-kitty that was our northern inheritance.”
― George Williamson

“I wasn't cold, but I was shivering when I walked onto the Clayton Road overpass. I wasn't scared either, even when I climbed over the rail. I didn't feel much of anything.”
― Craig Silvey, Honeybee

“I'm sure it's not any wish of mine that I'm born with inclinations for better things. If I could be born again, and had the designing of myself, I'd be born the lowest and coarsest-minded person imaginable, so that I could find plenty of companionship, or I'd be born an idiot, which would be better still.”
― Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career

“She could not then know that, even for the squarest peg, the right hole may ultimately be found”
― Henry Handel Richardson, The Getting of Wisdom

“While she waited for Nedim to say something, Evelyn found an unexpected item in the corner of her coat pocket – a rough, crumbling, dried-up eucalyptus leaf. Her mother had sent it in a letter, along with some articles she’d cut out from an Australian newspaper about mining in north-eastern Bosnia and a drawing by her sister’s younger son. She’d put them all by her bedside and cracked the then-fresh leaf like she used to as a kid, overcome by the rush of familiarity as the scent burst out.”
― Bronwyn Birdsall, Time and Tide in Sarajevo

“... this is love. Everything is spoken, nothing is said.”
― Helen Garner, Stories: The Collected Short Fiction

“I want to be the one doing the looking. I have developed a whole social demeanour with the aim of deflecting attention from my appearance, I actively dislike being looked at.”
― Helen Garner, Stories: The Collected Short Fiction

“I love long regarded my country as a secret, as a land half-won, its story half-told. It was as if the past was another country, mysterious and unexplained. 'Australian history' either was not taught or was not required for 'higher learning'. Contemporary history was unheard of. Black history was ridiculed. Historians and politicians, more concerned with imperial propriety than truth, covered up and distorted.”
― John Pilger

“Australians used to love to joke about the awfulness of their capital city, its social bleakness, its provinciality, its grandiose, curvaceous street design in which the visitor strives in vain to orient himself. But because I had spent many happy student holidays in Canberra in the 1960s, as the guest of a family I was deeply fond of, I had always loved the place, found it beautiful with its cloudless skies and dry air, and looked forward to every visit; but now, with my new sombre purpose, it seemed to change its nature.”
― Helen Garner, Joe Cinque's Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law

“They all had the same visions of breathing fresh, clean air and knowing their neighbors. The kids would eat homegrown veggies and learn the value of an honest day's work.”
― Jane Harper, The Dry

“What I do understand is that at any point in a woman’s life she may come across something like a cement pyramid in the middle of the road. Another person. People. She’s capable of sitting there, convinced that it would be impossible to forsake her position, till it becomes a private Thermopylae. This sort of block was probably designed for the survival of our species, but the cost’s high. What makes men superior is that they don’t – on the whole – stop functioning forever because of another person . . . .”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“She realised that he would never be sorry because he had refused to see her for who she was - and who she definitely wasn’t.”
― Anthea Syrokou, True Colours

“He came to the boundary gate, and wheeled, and dismounted. From the high land Sandalwood stretched out like a relief map: pale brown under dead barley grass, silver under dead rye grass, yellow under stubble; the folds of the bare hills marked dark green with wattle and gum. Sandalwood and young gums looked almost grey in the brown-purple hills, and the farthest hills, and the cloud shadows, and the far clumps of scrub were dark blue, and the east wind was dry as fire, and the whole huge land smelled of eucalyptus and dry grass and a harsh sweet smell like the stems of everlastings. The huge, huge land rolled out like a blanket under the world-enlarging cry of the crows, which made the screech of a snowstorm of white cockatoos in the river gums by the creek sound busy and trivial and frail.”
― Randolph Stow, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea

“La guerra sembrava qualcosa di sacro ed eroico, proprio come ci avevano insegnato a scuola. Qualcosa che dava un senso alle nostre vite e ci rendeva puri.
Cos'avevamo fatto per aver bisogno di una purificazione simile?”
― Anna Funder, All That I Am

“Il problema della vita è che puoi procedere solo alla cieca, in un'unica direzione. La memoria ha delle idee tutte sue; carpisce elementi da gni quando e cerca di metterli insieme. Ti sorprende da tutte le angolazioni, con tutto quello che sei venuto a sapere in seguito, e ti comunica le novità.”
― Anna Funder, All That I Am

“Il problema della vita è che puoi procedere solo alla cieca, in un'unica direzione. La memoria ha delle idee tutte sue; carpisce elementi da ogni quando e cerca di metterli insieme. Ti sorprende da tutte le angolazioni, con tutto quello che sei venuto a sapere in seguito, e ti comunica le novità.”
― Anna Funder, All That I Am

“Tutto quello che abbiamo visto e tutti quelli che abbiamo conosciuto entrano in noi e ci costituiscono, che ci piaccia o no. Siamo collegati in un disegno che non possiamo vedere e di cui non possiamo conoscere le conseguenze. Un'imperfezione qui, un punto saltato là, una bozza tra le fibre, e l'intera stoffa sarà diversa una volta che è intessuta.”
― Anna Funder, All That I Am

“The idea of discovery and consequent possession is used by those with neither the intelligence nor sensitivity to see the value in lives other than their own. Anyway, there is no need to possess anything when there is access to everything. It is only when someone says that your mother belongs to them that there is a problem.”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“How we name things is closely connected with how we perceive them. Why else would colonisers rename everything?”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“Writing destroys the pleasure of reading for all serious writers, by serious I mean those whose foremost topics are sex and death. Never again can you read without stopping to take note of peculiar adjectives and curious turns of phrase. To write well is to steal well. Perhaps this is why I excel at the craft. I was a thief before taking up the martyrdom of the pen. One takes these notes, scrawled on receipts and napkins, places them in front of him like a child with its toys, and constructs the sublime world of imagination.”
― Tommy Chigurh

“Craig Henderson. You are the most attractive real estate agent in the region.”
― Laura Jean McKay, Gunflower

“... have you ever watched someone you know front their own reflection in a mirror? ... You see a stiffening, a closing, a dimming; you see them pull on their own idea of themselves, the caricature that will soften and melt away the minute they think of something other than the enemy before them.”
― Helen Garner, Stories: The Collected Short Fiction

“Maybe that's what beauty is: loving being looked at. The beautiful are greedy.”
― Helen Garner, Stories: The Collected Short Fiction

“We've been trained in your tradition,' said Natalie. 'We're honorary men.”
― Helen Garner, Stories: The Collected Short Fiction

“Many years had to pass before I'd realise that life isn't about wishes coming true but about the slow revelation of what we really wished.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice