David Malouf famous quotes

04-12-2025

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.
-- David Malouf

#Pushing #Mystery #Consciousness
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
-- David Malouf

#People #Secret #Encounters
I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.
-- David Malouf

#Growing Up #Might #Grows
All the things we achieve are things we have first of all imagined.
-- David Malouf

#Firsts #Achieve
Silence is a form of communication. Speech divides us.
-- David Malouf

#Communication #Silence #Speech
Achilles too staggered a moment. He felt his soul change colour. Blood pooled at his feet, and though he continued to stand upright and triumphant in the sun, his spirit set off on its own downward path and approached the boarders of an unknown region.
-- David Malouf

#Feet #Blood #Soul
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.
-- David Malouf

#Men #Sky #Breathing
Now that spring is no longer to be recognised in blossoms or in new leaves on trees, I must look for it in myself. I feel the ice of myself cracking. I feel myself loosen and flow again, reflecting the world. That is what spring means.
-- David Malouf

#Art #Spring #Mean
I've long come to the conclusion that when people say they can't put a book down, they don't mean they're interested in what's happening next; they mean they are so mesmerised by the writer's voice and the relationship that has been established that they don't want to break that. That's what I feel when I read, and I'm sure now that that's what's going on in the relationship between the reader and the writing.
-- David Malouf

#Art #Book #Mean
The earth's warmth under me, as I stretch out at night, is astonishing. It is like the warmth of another body that has absorbed the sun all day and now gives out again its store of heat. It is softer, darker than I could ever have believed, and when I take a handful of it and smell its extraordinary odors, I know suddenly what it is I am composed of, as if the energy that is in this fistful of black soil had suddenly opened, between my body and it, as between it and the green stalks, some corridor along which our common being flowed.
-- David Malouf

#Nature #Night #Smell
I write not to record what I think but to discover what I think
-- David Malouf

#Wise #Writing #Thinking
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 becomeâ€¦ This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis.
-- David Malouf

#Real #Faults #Transformation
What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?
-- David Malouf

#Suffering #Refusal #Grows
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.
-- David Malouf

#Animal #Skins #New Life
Words his soul danced to.
-- David Malouf

#Soul

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