Patrick White Quotes

20 quotes in 338 categories

• Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty.
• To understand the stars would spoil their appearance.
• She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone…
• I expect we are all jealous of the women in their past, but how much less exciting if the women had not kept the bed…
• If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.
• She had begun to read in the beginning as a protection from the frightening and unpleasant things. She continued because, apart from the story, literature…
• If I have not lost my mind I can sometimes hear it preparing to defect
• Life is full of alternatives but no choice.
• I think it is impossible to explain faith. It is like trying to explain air, which one cannot do by dividing it into its component…
• My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage.
• As a result of the asthma I was sent to school in the country, and only visited Sydney for brief, violently asthmatic sojourns on my…
• Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry…
• In spite of holidays when I was free to visit London theatres and explore the countryside, I spent four very miserable years as a colonial…
• When I was rising eighteen I persuaded my parents to let me return to Australia and at least see whether I could adapt myself to…
• Even if a university should turn out to be another version of a school, I had decided I could lose myself afterwards as an anonymous…
• I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.
• I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking…
• Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The…
• I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table.
• In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.

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