Novelists From Australia

"I have examined you long enough. I have read your heart, and written out your secrets! You are but a shell—the shell that holds a corrupted and sinful heart. He shall live; you shall die!"

"I am not a teetotaller — at least, not now. I used to be, but my constitution is not strong, and I could not stand the dissipation."

"To describe a tempest of the elements is not easy, but to describe a tempest of the soul is impossible."

"No poor man can afford to have many friends. They would ruin him. Indeed, friendship is a luxury which should be indulged in with caution even by the rich."

"Borrowing may be reduced to a Science, or elevated to an Art. Borrowing an umbrella is a science; borrowing half-a-crown is an art. The man who begins with an umbrella may get to half-a-crown, or even five shillings.Some men are born borrowers, and some have borrowing thrust upon them; and some thrust borrowing upon other people. I made a man lend me twenty pounds for three months, by telling him that I would pay him punctually, and writing my name on a piece of paper. There is always a fool to be found somewhere. Sometimes lenders become unpleasant. One lender put me into gaol, and said I was a swindler. He had no appreciation for art."

"Mothers-in-law are ladies with daughters. A mother-in-law may be considered as the beard on the matrimonial oyster."

"I am rather good at it. I have been always borrowing. If I can borrow nothing else, I borrow ideas."

"It takes two persons to make a Proper Friendship. The one has to be befriended, the other to be friendly. I'd rather be the friendly man by a darned sight. He gets all the fat off the mutual leg of mutton, and not unfrequently scrapes the bone."

"Here I am in bed, with vinegar and brown paper over my nose, all the children sick, the baby howling like an unfledged tempest, some £500 to pay to-morrow; and as I sink disgustedly to sleep, Eliza murmurs (through the brown paper), "I hope you have spent a MERRY CHRISTMAS!""

"We find it so much easier, you will observe, to forgive our own shortcomings than the imperfections of our ladye-loves. This 'tis to be married; this 'tis to have linen and buck-baskets. Ay de mi!"

"Every country can claim for itself a of home manufacture. He of Australia is William Buckley."

"It is no use borrowing if you mean to pay. There have been more men ruined by 'temporary accommodation' than anything else."

"Why is Hamlet never a favourite with the woman-student? Merely because she sees him morally vivisected, and illustrated (so to speak) with coloured plates. loved him as the glass of fashion, and so forth; but when he groaned he was no longer a god; when he raised his arabesqued wings, he disclosed the segmented and woolly body common to the '—and all was over."

"His arrogance was not without grounds. He more than once unbent himself to confide to my own dad that he (the deponent, not my good old plebeian dad, for heaven's sake!) was the illegitimate son of an illegitimate son of ."

"Ah me! the husband once found out has no remedy that I can think of."

"Farce is the grimmest of all tragedy; it is the blind jollity of an Irish wake, with the silent guest none the less present because unassertive."

"I compare tracking to reading a letter written in a good business hand. You must'nt look at what's under your eye; you must see a lot at once, and keep a general grasp of what's on ahead, besides spotting each track you pass."

"... I noticed both women's eyes fixed on my face, with a disconcerting interest in the casual gossip. It is humiliating when you feel yourself expected to say something good, and a swift reconnaissance of the subject shows you no opening for anything beyond what a nobleman might drivel. Moreover, I was fresh from the pastoral regions, where etiquette demands frank, unsolicited, and copious comment on the merits or demerits of some absent person ..."

"His one positive quality was mendacity. ... He could lie. His style was ornate, yet reposeful; microscopically exact, yet large and sublime. You could sit down and rest in the cool shade of one of his fabrications."

"Men who tell you that you ought to go into Parliament are usually pretty safe. You can borrow from them easily. One of these persons told me that I ought to be a Member of Parliament, because I was such a thundering liar."

"I used to be a dreadful fellow — nearly as bad as the drunkards in the storybook. I have been drunk for a year and a-half at a stretch. It was natural for me to drink. When I was about three days and a-half old, I saw my nurse hide a brandy bottle away in a cupboard that she couldn't get at afterwards. I never said anything about it then, but as soon as I could walk, I got the keys and drank that brandy."

"As Mr Burnett said to me long ago, 'Q———, you will never be one of us. You have ruined your constitution by early temperance.'"

"I have just finished writing a full-sized novel; title, Such is Life; scenery, and northern Vic.; temper, democratic; bias, offensively Australian."

"Distrust the men who make bargains. They are a disgrace to humanity. No man ever saw a dog swap a bone with another dog."

"Unemployed at last!"

"A Man of Business is one who becomes possessed of other people's money without bringing himself under the power of the law."

"All my soul is slowly melting, all my brain is softening fast, And I know that I'll be taken to the Yarr bend at last. For at night from fitful slumbers I awaken with a start, Murmuring of steak and onions, babbling of apple-tart. While to me the Poet's cloudland a gigantic kitchen seems, And those mislaid table-napkins haunt me even in my dreams Is this right? — Ye sages tell me! — Does a man live but to eat? Is there nothing worth enjoying but one's miserable meat? Is the mightiest task of genius but to swallow buttered beans, And has man but been created to demolish pork and greens? Is there no unfed Hereafter, where the round of chewing stops? Is the atmosphere of heaven clammy with perpetual chops?"

"What can I write in thee, O dainty book, About whose daintiness quaint perfume lingers— Into whose pages dainty ladies look, And turn thy dainty leaves with daintier fingers? ...No melodies have I for ladies' ear, No roundelays for jocund lads and lasses— But only brawlings born of bitter beer, And chorussed with the clink and clash of glasses. ...Thou breathest purity and humble worth— The simple jest, the light laugh following after, I will not jar upon thy modest mirth With harsher jest, or with less gentle laughter."

"Our virgin continent! how long has she tarried her bridal day!"

"The successful pioneer is the man who never spared others; the forgotten pioneer is the man who never spared himself, but, being a fool, built houses for wise men to live in, and omitted to gather moss. The former is the early bird; the latter is the early worm."

"The two greatest supra-physical pleasures of life are antithetical in operation. One is to have something to do, and to know that you are doing it deftly and honestly. The other is to have nothing to do, and to know that you are carrying out your blank programme like a good and faithful menial."

"Comedy is tragedy, plucked unripe."

"... each man, be he king or beggar, is a little world of his own. If he be swayed by a female, as kings and beggars frequently are, he is an extremely little world."

"Age cannot limit him, nor use exhaust his infinite mendacity."

"The gods will give us some faults to make us men; therefore no man is up to the husband-ideal of a loving woman. The bachelor may reach this standard-for why shouldn't he be magnanimous, and mettlesome, and debonair; prepared to do all that may become a man, and sometimes even things that don't? And if he should fall a trifle short of the real Mackay-a contingency that you may safely count upon-he is in no way compelled to flaunt his own worthlessness before the feminine eye."

"Pritchard senior died of some unpronounceable scientific term signifying internal haemorrhage of irascibility and malevolence."

"Now, I have a theory that women do not love their husbands ... I hold that married life is a long-drawn ordeal, which no man short of a Chevalier Bayard has any business to face ..."

"... the married man must wear his rue (rue is good) with a difference. ... he will, in a general way, become sordid, and thrifty, and domesticated; he will learn to glory more in buying articles cheap at sales than in carrying off trophies from his compeers; he will become particular over his tucker, and cautious about getting his feet wet; he will become prudent, and circumspect, and churchwardenlike, and befittingly frightened in the presence of anything lawless, from a crash of thunder to a scrub-bred steer. And, gentle lady, there goes your ideal. Confess it, ye devil! Let us all ring Fancy's knell."

"Ten thousand women revered and idolized John Wesley; but there was one woman to whom he was small spuds, and few in a hill; one woman who used to put out her tongue at him when he was preaching, and who, in the seclusion of domestic life, cursed and cuffed him, and set him utterly at naught. That was the dear lady Disdain who had studied the demi-god's close-cropped, wigless cranium; who had watched him shaving, and had marked him snore o' nights; who was familiar with all his jokes, and who knew exactly how much truth there was in his yarns; who had heard the demi-god's voice saying: "D——n the boots! and the (adj.) snob that made them!"—or words to that effect."

"Better we were cold and still, with our famous Jim and Bill, Beneath the interdicted wattle-bough, For the angels made our date five-and-twenty years too late, And there is no for us now."

"The Australian black is as far removed from and Chingachook, as Uncas and Chingachook are from reality. ... An Australian Romeo would bear his Juliet off with the blow of a club, and Juliet would prepare herself for her bridal by "greasing herself from head to foot with the kidney-fat of her lover's rival." Poor Paris! ... No genius among them has ever invented a net or a snare. ... A child every two years is considered enough for any reasonable mother, and should she indulge in more, the indignant father cracks its skull against the nearest tree. Nothing is new, we see,—not even Social Science."

"Always listen to yourself... It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention."

"The power of one is above all things the power to believe in yourself, ofen well beyond any latent ability you may have previously demonstrated. The mind is the athlete, the body is simply the means it uses to run faster or longer, jump higher, shoot straighter, kick better, swim harder, hit further, or box better."

"When men can be made to hope, then they can be made to win."

"First with the head, then with the heart."

"Always in life an idea starts small, it is only a sapling idea, but the vines will come and they will try to choke your idea so it cannot grow, and it will die and you will never know you had a big idea, an idea so big it could have grown thirty meters through the dark canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky. The vines are people who are afraid of originality, of new thinking. Most people you encounter will be vines; when you are a young plant they are very dangerous. Always listen to yourself, Peekay. It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have learned something and you grow stronger. If you are right, you have taken another step toward a fulfilling life."

"Racism does not diminish with brains, it's a disease, a sickness, it may incubate in ignorance but it doesn't necessarily disappear with the gaining of wisdom!"

"Read any history of first contact between civilizations. Even if those in power on the weaker side are able to fight back, there are always those who turn traitor and support the invaders. They are the Luministes in the picture, they sell their own people into submission to gain power under the invader."

"People like tradition and certainty, especially when the world around them is changing so fast."

"As an amateur historian I think it’s the same, century after century: same shit, different flies."