Best 763 quotes in «australia quotes» category

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 would know this country, you must know its stories.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

Interstellar travel is like a flight to Australia on acid.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Its easy to wake up a person who is sleeping but its hard to wake up someone who is pretending to be asleep.

It is very good, Wisehammer, it's very well written, but it's too-too-political. It will be considered provocative." "You don't want me to say it." "Not tonight. We have many people against us." "I could tone it down. I could omit 'We left our country for our country's good.'" "That's the best line.

I took her word and didn't let my concern for my future ruin the present moment.

It's a fucking jail! A jail for people who've done nothing wrong except come here by boat. It's not even fucking illegal - did you know that?

It's easy to give up at the beginning of something, but after gaining a bit of momentum it's not as tempting or easy to just give up.

It seemed, at that point, my greed and cunningness were being rewarded.

It seems to me that the good lord in his infinate wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable- hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these was dogs.

It was a start, and a start is all anyone needs to put an end to something.

It was an impossible achievement but that didn't stop me from trying and having fun.

It was early summer. And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change.

It was as if I was automatically one of them because I smoked.

It was easy to imagine the beginning of time here, but also, perhaps, its end.

It was my duty as a mother to invade your privacy and search your room. I'm just glad you weren't hiding an illegal drug.

It was odd but I couldn't jump the chasm of missing evidence to the conclusion Todd was making.

it was so beautiful', he said. 'the Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. you've got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains....we used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvellous place it would be to come to for a holiday. however terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if its beautiful.

I've got one thing to say: I killed a lot of germans, and I'm only sorry I didn't kill more.

I've been to Australia. I've met the devil drank beer and snogged kangaroos.

I want to tell him that when we were in the camps waiting for a boat we spoke about what we imagined Australia would be like. Kangaroos, koalas, wide open spaces. Then, when we arrived, we were locked up and the images we had shrank smaller and smaller until Australia became tiny patches of sky beyond the barbed wire.

Looking back really does make you wonder, but the truth is it doesn't change a thing.

I wasn't pissed off; I was just robbed of most of the cocky confidence my cunningness had created.

Maybe I should have given more thought to her thoughts.

Lucinda might sneak from her own house at midnight to place a wager somewhere else, but she dared not touch the pack that lay in her own sideboard. She knew how passionate he had become about his 'weakness.' She dared not even ask him how it was he had reversed his opinions on the matter. But, oh, how she yearned to discuss it with him, how much she wished to deal a hand on a grey wool blanket. There would be no headaches then, only this sweet consummation of their comradeship. But she said not a word. And although she might have her 'dainty' shoes tossed to the floor, have her bare toes quite visible through her stockings, have a draught of sherry in her hand, in short appear quite radical, she was too timid, she thought, too much a mouse, to reveal her gambler's heart to him. She did not like this mouselike quality. As usual, she found herself too careful, too held in. Once she said: 'I wish I had ten sisters and a big kitchen to laugh in.' Her lodger frowned and dusted his knees. She thought: He is as near to a sister as I am likely to get, but he does not understand. She would have had a woman friend so they could brush each other's hair, and just, please God, put aside this great clanking suit of ugly armor. She kept her glass dreams from him, even whilst she appeared to talk about them. He was an admiring listener, but she only showed him the opaque skin of her dreams--window glass, the price of transporting it, the difficulties with builders who would not pay their bills inside six months. He imagined this was her business, and of course it was, but all the things she spoke of were a fog across its landscape which was filled with such soaring mountains she would be embarrassed to lay claim to them. Her true ambition, the one she would not confess to him, was to build something Extraordinary and Fine from glass and cast iron. A conservatory, but not a conservatory. Glass laced with steel, spun like a spider web--the idea danced around the periphery of her vision, never long enough to be clear. When she attempted to make a sketch, it became diminished, wooden, inelegant. Sometimes, in her dreams, she felt she had discovered its form, but if she had, it was like an improperly fixed photograph which fades when exposed to daylight. She was wise enough, or foolish enough, to believe this did not matter, that the form would present itself to her in the end.