Best 763 quotes in «australia quotes» category

God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning. Surely, while we live we are not lost. Oh Janos, Janos my brother! Surely we are not lost--while we live.

Here in my country I’ll live and roam My spirit sings here - This is my home.

He had been always escaping, always rebelling, always fighting against authority, and always being flogged. There had been a whole lifetime of torment such as this; forty-two years of it; and there he stood, speaking softly, arguing his case well, and pleading while the tears ran down his face for some kindness, for some mercy in his old age. 'I have tried to escape; always to escape,' he said, 'as a bird does out of a cage. Is that unnatural; is that a great crime?

here is nothing to see, however, and not a soul to meet. You might walk for twenty miles along this track without being able to fix a point in your mind, unless you are a bushman. This is because of the everlasting, maddening sameness of the stunted trees - that monotony which makes a man long to break away and travel as far as trains can go, and sail as far as ship can sail - and farther.

He seemed like he was baiting me to ask, like he wanted me to know his troubles but wanted me to ask first.

... He wanted to say that he'd learned to read in gaol [jail], to really read. He wanted to tell her that the library had been his favorite place inside, that when he read 'As I Lay Dying' he'd found a voice that made sense of time and space as he was experiencing it in gaol, that it had spoken to him more clearly and more profoundly than any voice he'd ever encountered before: of how the past could not be separated from memory, of how it was not only time that changed people, but memory as well.

He was on the edge of a cliff. And he wasn’t jumping, he was diving, a huge swan dive, like those famous cliff-top divers in some exotic place he’d seen on television once. Only they landed safely, bodies cutting into seawater like knife blades. And his dive was a killing one.

He was hard and tough and wiry - just the sort that won't say die - There was courage in his quick impatient tread; And he bore the badge of gameness in his bright and fiery eye, And the proud and lofty carriage of his head.

He was tender with her. He wiped her eyelids with his handkerchief, not noticing how soiled it was. It was stained with ink, crumpled, stuck together. Her lids were large and tender and the handkerchief was stiff, not nearly soft enough. He moistened a corner in his mouth. He was painfully aware of the private softness of her skin, of how the eyes trembled beneath their coverings. He dried the tears with an affection, a particularity, that had never been exercised before. It was a demonstration of 'nature.' He was a birth-wet foal rising to his feet.

He was the captain of the rugby team and he was built like a fucking gorilla. He had the personality of a fucking gorilla, too.

How appealing is my ferocious expression? Appealing like a cool drink on a summer day, or like kittens on a postcard?” She smiled. He’d delivered the question in his usual bass rumble and she was surprised to realize that she hadn’t thought a voice that deep and masculine could actually say words like ‘kittens’ and ‘lovely’. Just like she hadn’t thought such a big, ferocious-looking man was capable of such playfulness. 21%

Honestly, if I stay on this gruelling path, I'm going to end up as another suicide statistic.

I am not your dog that you whistle for; I’m not a stray animal you call over, and I am not, I never have been, nor will I ever be, your “baby”!

I am halfway through Hillary Clinton's latest called "Living History"...pretty lighthearted on the scale...unlike David Hick's autobiography...I had to skip a couple of hundred pages in the middle of that one because it was too distressing for me to read. Undoubtedly yours will be the same...I will read the beginning, skip all the awful bit in the middle and read your happy ever after bit at the end.

...I'd felt dread about how average and suburban Brisbane seemed. The normalcy was stifling and that I yearned for bigger things, that I missed New York.

I can make you feel, and I can scare you for real. -Misty Lee

I'd been exposed to alternate ways of thinking and it seriously affected the way my mother had reared me.

I decided an Akubra did not a bushy make - Ellen Read - An Ordinary Man .

I didn't wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly

I'd developed an apology-is-much-better-than-asking-for-permission mentality.

I didn't appreciate the moment as much as I should have while living it, but I can attribute that to my poor emotional state and hindsight.

I didn't let what I wanted to do become a made up memory that I looked back on years down the road and wished it was real.

I felt like a toilet frog during the last three decades of the preceding century. (38)

I'd shown interest, and showing interest in Bali means that the salesman is most likely going to walk away with your money.

If ever a place had a karma of damnation, it's Rottnest. And all those slick galleries selling Aboriginal art were eroding away my will to live. It's as if Germans built a Jewish food hall over Buchenwald.

I found that disturbing the night's calm ambience was almost as gratifying as the ambience itself.

I found it hard to get motivated because I found it hard to care.

If I hadn't worked up the courage to talk to Christy, she most likely would have been a pretty face that disappeared back into the crowd.

If you would know this country, you must know its stories.

If you're not happy with yourself, how can you even begin to figure out if another person makes you happy, annoyed, angry, sad and so on.

If you will it, it's not a dream.

I hope the next time you get a double-decker strawberry ice-cream cone the ice cream part falls off the cone and lands in Australia.

I liked learning but the challenge was that my mother's need to turn education into a competition was ruining the experience for me.

I let my initial stance on her prettiness stand and didn't let any superficial thoughts hobble it.

I love long regarded my country as a secret, as a land half-won, its story half-told. It was as if the past was another country, mysterious and unexplained. 'Australian history' either was not taught or was not required for 'higher learning'. Contemporary history was unheard of. Black history was ridiculed. Historians and politicians, more concerned with imperial propriety than truth, covered up and distorted.

I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror – The wide brown land for me!

I'll tell you what you want to hear. I mean, what I need to hear. I'll tell the truth.

I mean it. Aside from the old coastal cities, which in Australia are still very young themselves, what you have is a vast stretch of wilderness, wholly natural, with all the horror that nature brings to the table when she dines." "You make it sound like we'll barely survive," Clare said. "Oh, I'm sure we will, at least the journey to Port Darwin. From there we won't have to struggle with anything more lethal than a train carriage, I hope. My point is that this is a young country in an old land. And those who don't walk with respect in the wilderness do have a tendency to get eaten.

In a world of differing opinions, mentally unstable people and complete psychopaths, it was the type of simplistic notion that some people wouldn't want to follow or ignorance would just simply not allow them to understand.

I must have appeared like a real bad boy in Christy's eyes. Well, at least a bad boy by home and away standards.

In a seedy cinema on ru du Temple, watching Disney's Peter Pan with my son, I found that although we were all gazing at the same screen in the flickering dark, I was seeing a different film to the rest of the audience. What seemed fantastical and exotic to the Parisian kids looked like home to me. I knew secret coves and hidey-holes like those of the Lost Boys. I'd grown up in a world of rocky islands, boats and obscuring bush. To my mind the only setting that was alien - even whimsical - was the cold, lonely nursery in the Darling family attic. The wild opportunity of Neverland with its freedom from adult surveillance was deeply, warmly familiar. Watching the movie for the umpteenth time and seeing it anew, forsaking story and focusing greedily on the backdrop, I understood what a complete stranger I was in that hemisphere. But acknowledging my strangeness made those years abroad easier to digest and enjoy.

In Japan, educational focus is often on scholastic ability and test scores, whereas Australian education uses a range of skills to develop the individual, e.g., discussion abilities, participation and developing independence, for example, life skills

In this century, the Australian Century, Australia will also have an opportunity to achieve extraordinary feats. Just as the United States dominates world affairs with less than five per cent of the global population, Australia too can make a lasting impression with its own limited demographics. The rise of the global middle class is Australia’s pathway to exceptionalism.

Interstellar travel is like a flight to Australia on acid.

Invisible magpies warbled in the plane trees. Softly, gently, never running out of melodic ideas, they perched among the leaves and spun out their endless tales.

I realised I got anxious because my true aspiration wasn't to become the chief of a multi-billion dollar, multi-national company that created widgets or some shit.

It is a different world today from what it was then. It will be a different world tomorrow from what it is today.

I think the biggest impacts on marketing for Australia in the future will be the ability to understand and meet the needs of Asian consumers

I remember that there was a time when I believed that a government and its departments were there to meet the needs, to understand the needs, and to act on the needs of the people for whom they have taken responsibility. It took me some time to question why it was in relation to [Aboriginal] people that they did not meet the needs, or take the steps, that responsible government demands. Why do they not provide the simple basics in the ways that work for us? Why not? There has never been an honest answer to this.

It's called the kindness of a fellow human being. You should try it sometime, ya fuck.