David Malouf 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.

  David Malouf

  Pushing, Mystery, Consciousness

  FaceBook post by David Malouf from Dec 16, 2013

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• All the things we achieve are things we have first of all imagined.

  David Malouf

  Firsts, Achieve

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• 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

  David Malouf

  People, Secret, Encounters

  FaceBook post by David Malouf from Oct 30, 2011

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• Silence is a form of communication. Speech divides us.

  David Malouf

  Communication, Silence, Speech

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• I write not to record what I think but to discover what I think

  David Malouf

  Wise, Writing, Thinking

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

  David Malouf

  Growing Up, Might, Grows

  David Malouf (2015). “Johnno”, p.107, Univ. of Queensland Press

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• I've long come to the conclusion that when people say they can't put a book down, they don't mean they're interested in what's happening next; they mean they are so mesmerised by the writer's voice and the relationship that has been established that they don't want to break that. That's what I feel when I read, and I'm sure now that that's what's going on in the relationship between the reader and the writing.

  David Malouf

  Art, Book, Writing

  "David Malouf - 'Dream Stuff'". Interview with Ramona Koval, www.abc.net.au. April 14, 2000.

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• 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.

  David Malouf

  Real, Faults, Transformation

  David Malouf (2012). “An Imaginary Life”, p.58, Random House

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• The earth's warmth under me, as I stretch out at night, is astonishing. It is like the warmth of another body that has absorbed the sun all day and now gives out again its store of heat. It is softer, darker than I could ever have believed, and when I take a handful of it and smell its extraordinary odors, I know suddenly what it is I am composed of, as if the energy that is in this fistful of black soil had suddenly opened, between my body and it, as between it and the green stalks, some corridor along which our common being flowed.

  David Malouf

  Nature, Night, Smell

  David Malouf (2012). “An Imaginary Life”, p.147, Random House

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• 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.

  David Malouf

  Animal, Skins, Unseen

  David Malouf (2011). “The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World”, p.87, Black Inc.

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• We are continuous with all the particles of our physical being, as in our breathing we are continuous with the sky. Between our bodies and the world there is unity and commerce.

  David Malouf

  Men, Sky, Breathing

  David Malouf (2012). “An Imaginary Life”, p.147, Random House

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

  David Malouf

  Suffering, Refusal, Grows

  Karin Hansson, David Malouf (1991). “Lund Studies in English”

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• We’re such contrary creatures

  David Malouf

  Creatures, Contrary

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• Now that spring is no longer to be recognised in blossoms or in new leaves on trees, I must look for it in myself. I feel the ice of myself cracking. I feel myself loosen and flow again, reflecting the world. That is what spring means.

  David Malouf

  Art, Spring, Mean

  David Malouf (2012). “An Imaginary Life”, p.60, Random House

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• With all those prizes the most interesting thing is getting on to the shortlist, because that tells you who people see as your peers.

  David Malouf

  People, Interesting, Peers

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• 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.

  David Malouf

  Blood, Feet, Soul

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• Words his soul danced to.

  David Malouf

  Soul

  David Malouf (1994). “Remembering Babylon”, Vintage

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