45 David Malouf Quotes on An Imaginary Life, Dance and An Imaginary Life - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous David Malouf quotes. There are more than 45 quotes in our David Malouf quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning David Malouf wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like An Imaginary Life, Dance and An Imaginary Life

the great all-embracing sound that rose from the dazzling earth, a layered music, dense but deeply flowing, that was clippered insects rubbing their legs together, bird-notes, grass-stems chaffing and fretting in the breeze.

Fly Away Peter Quotes

If it was easy here to lose yourself in the immensities of the land, under a sky that opened too far in the direction of infinity, you could also do it (every woman knew this) in a space no longer than five paces from wall to wall; to find yourself barging about the hut like a trapped bird, clutching at whatever came to hand, a warm teapot, a startled child, a shirt with the smell of sweat on it, to steady yourself against the cyclone that had blown up in the gap between you and the nearest bedpost, and threatened to sweep you out the door where nothing, not a flat iron, not the names of children on your lips, could hold you down against the vast upward expanse of your breath.

Remembering Babylon Quotes

So many things were new. Everything changed. The past would not hold and could not be held.

Fly Away Peter Quotes

Mathematics. It soothed, it allowed you, once you had perceived it, to breathe.

The prospect of going home again scared them. They couldn't imagine how they could ever settle to it. How they could just walk around the streets and pretend to be normal, look women in the eye again after what they had done and seen, ride on trams, sit at a table with a white cloth, and control their hands and just slowly eat. It was the little things that scared them. The big things you could hide in. It was little ones that gave a man away.

Prisoner of war Quotes Soldier Quotes World war ii Quotes

Achilles too staggered a moment. He felt his soul change colour. Blood pooled at his feet, and though he continued to stand upright and triumphant in the sun, his spirit set off on its own downward path and approached the boarders of an unknown region.

History Quotes Soul Quotes / Achilles Quotes

I scoffed at such old fashioned notions as duty, patriotism, the military virtues. And here I was, aged fifty, standing on guard at the very edge of the known world. To protect what? A hundred or so mud and wattle huts, three hundred savage strangers who do not even speak my tongue. And, of course, my own skin.

An Imaginary Life Quotes Duty and attitude Quotes

What does it mean to be ,' he thought, 'except to be known?

Existence Quotes

There is more to darkness than nightfall.

Darkness Quotes Earth Hour Quotes

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.

Evolution Quotes The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World Quotes

A life wasn't for anything. It simply was.

Fly Away Peter Quotes

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.

Johnno Quotes

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.

Johnno Quotes

Shy GiftsShy gifts that come to us from a world that may noteven know we’re here. Windfalls, scantlings.Breaking a bough like breathy flute-notes, a rowof puffed white almond-blossom, the word in hidingamong newsprint that has other news to tell.In a packed aisle at the supermarket, I catchthe eye of a wordless one-year-old, whale-blue,unblinking. It looks right through me, recognisingwhat? Wisely mistrustful but unwiselyimpulsive as we are, we take these givingsas ours and meant for us — why else so leapto receive them? — and go home lighterof step to the table set, the bed turned down, the booklaid open under the desk-lamp, pages astreamwith light like angels' wings, arched for take-off.

Earth Hour Quotes Poetry Quotes

Toccata IIA man sits pen in hand, paperbefore him. What is on his mindhe will set down now, the word not to be spokenlightly. As if of allhis words this was the one that touched the heartof things and made touchthe last sense of all as it was the first, and the wordthat speaks it loadedwith all that came strongest, a planet's-worthof sunlight, cooling green, the close comfortof kind. It is the world he must set downnow, also lightly, each thingchanged yet as it was: in so many fumblings traced backto the print of his fingertips still warm upon it, the warmththat came when he was touched.The last, as he sets it down, no more thana breath, though muchthat is still to be grasped may turn upon it.

Earth Hour Quotes Poetry Quotes Words Quotes Writing Quotes

There is law enough all about usin almanack and season, anniversarydays come round, the round earth's carnivaleof chimes and recessionals.Good to be includedthere. Good also what is notfixed or sure even,the second breath of beinghere when the May-bushsnows in mid-September, as giddyhappenstance leads usthis way intoa lost one's arms, or that waydeeper into the maze.

Earth Hour Quotes Life Quotes Poetry Quotes

Till they arrived no other lives had been lived here. It made the air that much thinner, harder to breathe. She had not understood, till she came to a place where it was lacking, the extent to which her sense of the world had to do with the presence of those who had been there before, leaving signs of their passing and spaces still warm with their breath - a threshold worn with the coming and going of feet, hedges between fields that went back a thousand years, and the names even further; most of all, the names on headstones, which were their names, under which lay the bones that had made their bones and given them breath.

Wisdom Quotes / Remembering Babylon Quotes

But here we call it Spring, when a young man’s fancy turns,fitfully, lightly, to idling in the sun,to touching in the dark. And the old man's?To worms in their garden box; stepping asidea moment in a poem that will remember,fitfully, who made it and the discordand stammer, and change of heart and catch of breathit sprang from. A bending downlightly to touch the earth.

Ageing Quotes Earth Hour Quotes Poetry Quotes Youth Quotes

The planet, saved for another day, stokes upits slow-burning gases and toxic dust, gold rift and scarletgash that take our breath away; a world at its interminableshow of holy dying. And we go with it, the oldgatherer and hunter. To its gaudy-day, though the contributionis small, adding our handsel of warm clay.

Nature Quotes / Earth Hour Quotes Environmentalism Quotes Poetry Quotes

Only slowly, after long watching, did he begin to distinguish the small signs that made them trackable: the ball of gristle in the corner of a man's cheek, which you could actually hear the soft click of if you listened for it; the swelling of the wormlike vein in a man's temple just below the hairline, the tightening of the crow's feet round his eyes, the almost imperceptible flicker of pinkish, naked lids; a deepening of the hollow above a man's collarbone as his throat muscles tenses, and some word he was holding back, because it was unspeakable, went up and down there, a lump of something he could neither swallow nor cough up.He saw these things now, and what astonished him was how much they gave away.

Remembering Babylon Quotes

Enemies, like friends, told you who you were.

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

Johnno Quotes

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.

Johnno Quotes

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.

Johnno Quotes

In time, most children stop being puzzled in this way. They settle in. The world around them, as it becomes familiar and daily, becomes ordinary. But for writers, like children who have never quite grown up, life retains a quality of strangeness; it remains a matter of questions for which there are no satisfactory answers, of hidden motives, displaced explanations, subtle concealments and mysteries. Eavesdropping of one kind or another, keeping an eye open and an ear cocked, even in public places, for the giveaway facial expression or gesture, the revealing word, becomes a settled habit for the writer, a necessary part of his professional equipment: the laying down of small scraps of information, of observation or experience, for future use.

On Experience Quotes Writing Quotes

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

An Imaginary Life Quotes

What drew him back was something altogether more personal, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing on the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone that he knew would never appear. He had long understood that one of his selves, the earliest and most vulnerable, had never left this place, and this original and clearest view of things could be recovered only through what had first come to him in the glow of its ordinary light and weather...it was the light they appeared in that was the point, and that at least had not changed.

History Quotes / Adolescence Quotes Dream Stuff: Stories Quotes Past Quotes Personal history Quotes Waiting Quotes

Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world.

Ransom Quotes Words Quotes

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

An Imaginary Life Quotes

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

An Imaginary Life Quotes

Or does not knowing make him free?

An Imaginary Life Quotes

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.

An Imaginary Life Quotes

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

History Quotes / The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World Quotes

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

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

An Imaginary Life Quotes

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.

An Imaginary Life Quotes

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.

Essays Quotes Fiction Quotes Literature Quotes The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World Quotes

We are free at last to believe in ourselves.

An Imaginary Life Quotes

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.

Inspirational Quotes / An Imaginary Life Quotes Death Quotes Life Quotes Memory Quotes

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

An Imaginary Life Quotes

Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.

An Imaginary Life Quotes Identity Quotes Life Quotes Mask Quotes

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 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.

An Imaginary Life Quotes

Words his soul danced to.

Soul Quotes / Dance Quotes Literature Quotes Words Quotes

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.

An Imaginary Life Quotes Life Quotes Self Quotes