Quotes from Frank Moorhouse

The buying of a whole bottle does not require that you drink the whole bottle. Mother's Rule of eating everything on your plate does not apply to alcohol.

One of the tenets of civility is the willingness to be publicly courteous with those with whom we disagree or dislike when inescapably we find ourselves in their company.

Remember the words of Taine: "for a young person the world always seems a scandalous place". Later in life, the world seems only to be an imperfect place which can be worked on here and there. I'm told that finally, in old age, the world becomes either infinitely amusing or infinitely annoying — according to one's temperament.

It is not in the nature of things to understand one's children. Children are in a conspiracy against the adult world to get their ways, and vice versa.

Face-to-face life is all too alive and too formidably rich in meanings. Too intense.As with the sun, we should stay out of it as much as possible.

A society remains functional as long as too many people aren't corrupt in too many places for too long.

Settling Down is seen as something of a renunciation of the Good Life (it is, of course, for most, a swapping of one sort of good life for another).

Dust represents the disintegration of the universe.

But he had the look also of a man who had thought his way through to another wiser place. To a wiser but not a happier place.

Civilisation is soap".

Here, in the foyer of the League of Nations, Edith Campbell Berry stands.

She had a deeper conviction that procedures and attitudes could be evolved that extracted the poison from disagreement. She had a fantasy that there was always a formulation which could give painless compromise, if one only had the time.