David Malouf

“So long as we are driven by the need to make up for our needs; by the restless sense that we are not yet fully assured of our place in the world and our hold on its swarming phenomena; so long as there is more to be discovered and made, more to grasp for and make real, we must go on inventing ourselves.”

“... history is forever unfinished, forever in process; endless because our needs are endless.”

“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.”

“I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six. I am there.”

“I now have of a life that stretches beyond the limits of measurable time.”

“What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?”

“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.”

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

“Or does not knowing make him free?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We are free at last to believe in ourselves.”

“I have heard no word of my own language; I am rendered dumb.”

“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.”

“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”

“I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.”

“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.”

“Now as I began to sort through his “effects” it occurred to me how little I had really known him … I had forced upon my father the character that fitted most easily with my image of myself; to have had to admit to any complexity in him would have compromised my own.”

“The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact.”

“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.”

“Words his soul danced to.”

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