43 quotes found
Novelist · Australian
Australian novelist
“I am part of all that I have met.”
“But what reality was ever made by realists?”
“Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.”
“All life is only allegory and the real story is not here...”
“The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.”
“A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.”
“What was a prisoner of war anyway? Less than a man, just material to be used to make the railway, like the teak sleepers and steel rails and dog spikes.”
“Tracker Marks was of a different opinion. Though he seemed more white than a white man, he had no time for their ways. For him his dress, his deportment was no different than staying downwind in th...”
“Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between ones words and ones soul.”
“The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of securitynational, i...”
“Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series...”
“Because courage, survival, loveall these things didnt live in one man. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon t...”
“As they made their way to the coast, he bemoaned the hotel trade in the manner, Dorrigo felt, that those who love what they do bemoan their passion the most.”
“The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or sorrow or wo...”
“To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet w...”
“Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentle...”
“I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of th...”
“Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation & reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults & is easily ivied over with paid praises”
“It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words - all the words that did not say things directly - were for him the most truthful.”
“-to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!”
“Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans' earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blin...”
“In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as...”
“Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites.For the line was broken, as all lines finally...”
