australian-novels

"Fate always gives you two choices, the one you should take, and the one you do."

"Anything that can be put in a nutshell should remain there."

"A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be."

"We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry."

"The lies we tell ourselves are the ghosts that haunt the empty house of midnight."

"Happiness is a myth, which was invented to make us buy things."

"Men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, it’s the other way around."

"A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and fear are exactly the same, we call the dream a nightmare."

"At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread instead is that we won't stop loving them, even after they are dead and gone."

"Despotism despises nothing so much as righteousness in its victims."

"If you make your heart into a weapon, you always end up using it on yourself."

"Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it's worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the end."

"The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,' he said, 'It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds and there are bad deeds. Men are just men —it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good or evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone —the noblest of man alive or the most wicked— has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God."

"Fate’s way of beating us in a fair fight is to give us warnings that we hear, but never heed."

"The sane man is simply a better liar than an insane man."

"There’s no meanness too spiteful or too cruel, when we hate someone for all the wrong reasons."

"Lovers find their way by insights and confidences; they are the stars they use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering."

"One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone."

"It’s a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm."

"Nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be."

"If fate doesn't make you laugh, then you don't get the joke."

"Every day, when you are on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending."

"The difference between news and gossip-News tells you what people did, gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it."

"Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that's all there is. Love & its duty, sorrow & its truth. In the end that's all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn."

"One of the reasons why we crave love, & seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, & shame, & sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you."

"The past reflects eternally between two mirrors - the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn't do or say."

"I know now that it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it's a sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love."

"That's how we keep this crazy place together - with the heart.... India is the heart. It's the heart that keeps us together. There's no place with people, like my people, Lin. There's no heart like the Indian heart."

"Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we've loved them, left them, or fought them."

"I stood in the harsh electric light of that new tunnel, in Bombay's Arthur Road Prison, and I wanted to laugh. Hey guys, I wanted to say, can't you be a little more original? But I couldn't speak. Fear dries a man's mouth, and hate strangles him. That's why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words."

"Indians are the Italians of Asia and vice versa. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is the music inside the body and music is the food inside the heart. Amore or Pyar makes every man a poet, a princess of peasant girl if only for second eyes of man and woman meets."

"Most loves are like that ... You heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and independence. After a while, you start throwing people out - your friends, everyone you used to know. And it's still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it's going to take you down with it. I've seen that happen to a lot of girls here. That's why I'm sick of love."

"There's a truth deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabhakar told it to me, just as I'm telling it to you now."

"I was going through deep and silent water. Nothing and no-one could make me happy. Nothing and no-one could make me sad. I was tough. Which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man."

"But the soul has no culture. The soul has no color, or accent, or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul cannot be stilled."

"Optimism is the first cousin of love and it is exactly like love in three ways: it's pushy, it has no real sense of humor, and it shows up where you least expect it."

"Lorian recalls how Dartemis was never an 'innocent child', but the youngest and most powerful of the three siblings. He'd had to take his brother to another world for the boy's own safety. A world where he remains very much alive today. A world where even his greedy sister cannot defect life. And it is there he will remain, continuing to harness his powers — a lord, a magician and much more. Lorian remembers the day he saw his brother working magic — such powerful and unusual magic. He knew that with Dartemis's talents at her fingertips, Lathenia would become too strong. But for now there are other matters more pressing — the resolution of this conflict, without war."

"For all his short life the boy has been aware of his sister’s love for all things strange or extraordinary, like unusual flowers, orphaned woodland creatures, vivid sunsets. And many times he would simply sit in awe of her adventurous spirit, wishing that he too were old enough, or large enough, to swing down those cliffs with only a single rope tied around his waist. He shrugs and sits on the moist grass beside her, content in the knowledge that he won’t always be four years old."

"I want to take you to a place where it is midnight every day and black irises glisten under a bleeding moon."

"Personally, I don't think about what people have for breakfast. I have better things to do with my thoughts."

"She screams. And her scream is heard from one end of the universe to the other. The words, 'They will suffer,' are wrenched from between purple lips. Lathenia, the Goddess of Chaos, stares through her sphere to the past. A sphere she uses to create enough chaos to alter the present and produce a future that will have the world at her feet."

"They will pay dearly for this. They will pay with blood, with fear, and with many lives."

"What a pity, I could have enjoyed calling you…It"

"So they decided to play Ping-Pong with the universe?"

"The heart is a strange thing. It's also a significant weakness."

"But trust is what the Guard is all about. Faith in what doesn't always make sense."

"Maybe evil never dies, and once in your blood, stays there for ever, lying dormant until something comes along to trigger it. Is that how it is with my father? He's still in jail today for the crimes committed against my step mother. Marduke saw evil in me. He sensed it. And look at the things I've done, the people I've hurt. Can anyone really change?"

"All they knew was that they were going to the settlement to go to school. Rain clouds were gathering and by the time they reached the bend where large grey boulders loomed along either side of the road, the sky was black with rain clouds."

"We’d better hurry, it’s going to rain again." They stood briefly on the verandah to watch the thunder clouds rumbling in the west. There was a flash of lightning, followed by another. "Quick, run," urged Martha. "It’s going to rain."

"We all know it’s awful," said Martha. "But we all got over it."