Quotes from David Malouf

We are continuous with all the particles of our physical being, as in our breathing we are continuous with the sky. Between our bodies and the world there is unity and commerce.

What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.

Words his soul danced to.

Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.

I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that which drives us on to what we must finally become… This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis.

I knew that the world around you is only uninteresting if you can't see what is really going on. The place you come from is always the most exotic place you'll ever encounter because it is the only place where you recognise how many secrets and mysteries there are in people's lives

I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six. I am there.

Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world.

So these things happen, deep in our lives. We do not speak of them. We hide them even from ourselves, but they do not leave us.

We are free at last to believe in ourselves.

Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.

history is forever unfinished, forever in process; endless because our needs are endless.

Scarlet! It is the first colour I have seen in months. Or so it seems. Scarlet. A little wild poppy, of a red so sudden it made my blood stop. I kept saying the word over and over to myself, scarlet, as if the word, like the colour, had escaped me till now, and just saying it would keep the little windblown flower in sight.

I now have of a life that stretches beyond the limits of measurable time.

Everything I ever valued before this was valued only because it was useless, because time spent upon it was not demanded but freely given, because to play is to be free. Free is not a word that exists here, I think, in their language. Nothing here is free of its own nature, its own law.

Or does not knowing make him free?

Always to be pushing out like this, beyond what I know cannot be the limits - what else should a man's life be?

That is what life meant, a unique presence, and it was essential in every creature.

Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely… It is simply the most ordinary place in the world…It was so shabby and makeshift … a place where poetry could never occur.

I have heard no word of my own language; I am rendered dumb.

What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?

I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.

So many things were new. Everything changed. The past would not hold and could not be held.

But here we call it Spring, when a young man's fancy turns, fitfully, lightly, to idling in the sun, to touching in the dark. And the old man's? To worms in their garden box; stepping aside a moment in a poem that will remember, fitfully, who made it and the discord and stammer, and change of heart and catch of breath it sprang from. A bending down lightly to touch the earth.