Quotes from Patrick White

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 brought with it a kind of gentility for which she craved.

They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn't notice he was touched, because he wouldn't have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.

I am compelled into this country.

If I have not lost my mind I can sometimes hear it preparing to defect

Life doesn't end on the kitchen floor while there is the will to dance.

The mystery of life is not salved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.

His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.

No animal suffers worse than a human being.

I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while the callous see us as dispensable objects, like broken furniture or dead flowers. For the young we scarcely exist unless we are unavoidable members of the same family, farting, slobbering, perpetually mislaying teeth and bifocals.

It was Sunday, and Mumma had gone next door with Lena and the little ones. Under the pepper tree in the yard Pa was sorting, counting, the empty bottles he would sell back: the bottles going clink clink as Pa stuck them in the sack. The fowls were fluffing in the dust and sun: that crook-neck white pullet Mumma said she would hit on the head if only she had the courage to; but she hadn't.

The worst thing about love between human beings is that when you are prepared to love them they don't want it; when they do its you who can't bear the idea.

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross.

To kiss and to kill are similar words to eyes that focus with difficulty.

Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of the novels for which I am now acclaimed.

Poetry resists academic pretension, just as the mystery of religious faith evaporates on contact with dogma.

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 particle of the London I already loved.

I forget what I was taught. I only remember what I have learnt.

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 and plays.

There's many benefits from a good read, just as some must sing a lungful of psalm, or take the bottle down from the shelf.

Inspiration descends only in flashes, to clothe circumstances; it is not stored up in a barrel, like salt herrings, to be doled out.

My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage.

Where have you been, Theodora?," Mrs Goodman asked. "Walking, Mother." "And whom did you see?" Mrs Goodman flung her grammar like a stone. "I did not see a cat," said Theodora. Mrs Goodman looked at her daughter, who giggled before she left the room.

At times his arrogance did resolve itself into simplicity, though it was difficult, especially for strangers, to distinguish these occasions.

He himself, he realized, had always been most abominably frightened, even at the height of his divine power, a frail god upon a rickety throne, afraid of opening letters, of making decisions, afraid of the instinctive knowledge in the eyes of mules, of the innocent eyes of good men, of the elastic nature of the passions, even of the devotion he had received from some men, and one woman, and dogs.