Quotes from Ruth Park

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

In a still hot morning, the tide went out and didn't come back in. This was not a spectacular event. The sea did not roll up like a scroll, like the sky in Revelations. It quietly withdrew.

You're a hidjus old pollywobble!

Having a baby is different from all the ordinary ways of being hurt. it's worth it all. Other pain isn't worth anything, but that is.

What has being a girl to do with anything if a person in properly qualified?' ... 'It's what you call prejudice,' she said.

And when he got home he started on Mumma. He hated her then, because in her fatness and untidiness and drabness she reminded him of what he himself was when he was sober.

The announcer, in milky tones, rolled out the commercial; it was all about some sort of washing powder that made laundry days a mere frolic in the backyard

Elva had said nothing to anyone. She prayed earnestly that she was all right, explaining over and over again to God what the doctor had said, and how she couldn't properly look after the children she already had. Elva liked to pray in front of a statue similar to the one in her mother's living-room. She was not praying to the statue, but it was a kind of magical doll that kept her thoughts focussed on the Being to whom she prayed.

Sweeties were a breakfast cereal. They did not snap,crackle or pop, or do anything the more talented cereals did.

Writing is a passion I have never understood, yet a storyteller is all I have ever wanted to be.

Experience soon taught me never to write about anything important to me - the M?oris, animals, the unemployed men, the empty boarded-up houses that frightened me. The subsequent trampling of my sensibilities would have destroyed me. Soon everything I wrote came only from my imagination.

Then she said, with piteous defiance, If I could love her, the Good Lord could, and he won't be too hard on an old lady who didn't have an easy life.

I've got lots of brains, said Wombat. You listen to them rattle. He shook his head and it rattled beautifully.

a]nd the Pig Man came in from Waitomo and swore that if Louisa didn't marry him he'd damn well vote Labour at the next election. And I don't care if the country does go to rack and ruin, he said.

In those days of the second World War it was still widely believed that women who had just delivered could reasonably be expected to be off their heads. 'Yes, dear,' these meek women said, with a certain mournful importance. 'I was outa me mind. Terrible, really. All me milk went to the brain. I suppose it curdles, like.

In a still hot morning, the tide went out and didn't come back in. This was not a spectacular event. The sea did not roll up like a scroll, like the sky in Revelations. It quietly withdrew.

Writing is a passion I have never understood, yet a storyteller is all I have ever wanted to be.

He who climbs a cliff may die on the cliff, so what? Always a risk-taker by nature, now I became one by intent.