Top 92 John Marsden Quotes
#1. Death comes walking across the countryside swinging that scythe, and he might get you or he might not.
John Marsden
#2. Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.
John Marsden
#3. We're all so curiously alone, but it's important to keep making signals through the glass
John Marsden
#4. My pen.' Funny, I wrote that without noticing. 'The torch', 'the paper', but 'my pen'. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It's about the most important thing I own.
John Marsden
#5. Dying's a fearful popular activity these days so we often double 'em up.
John Marsden
#6. I'm a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that's me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I'd die; I don't know what of, I just knew I'd die.
John Marsden
#7. Oh Ellie, doesn't it make your mouth water?"
"It makes me water all right," I said crudely. "But not from my mouth.
John Marsden
#9. Do you think Lee's all right?'
'I'm praying my ass off.'
At that moment came the happiest sight I'd ever seen. A thin hand appeared out of the shovel, made a V sign or a peace sign-it was hard to tell in the dimness-and disappeared again.
John Marsden
#10. The only true test of friendship is the time your friend spends on you.
John Marsden
#11. Silence, always my fortress, sometimes my prison
John Marsden
#12. He carried Hell with him, as we all did, like a little load on our backs that we hardly noticed most of the time, or like a huge great hump of suffering that bent us over with its weight.
John Marsden
#13. Sometimes I got worried that my memory was falling apart.
John Marsden
#14. We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.
John Marsden
#15. If you added up all the really significant episodes in your life they'd probably come to less than sixty minutes.
John Marsden
#16. Cynicism is like gastro: it goes through your whole system and makes you shitty.
John Marsden
#17. Sometimes I think I'd rather be frightened than bored. At least when you're frightened you know you're alive.
John Marsden
#18. Silence, sometimes my fortress, always my prison.
John Marsden
#20. The world was quickly forgetting us. And there was little news to report.
John Marsden
#21. I felt that my life was permanently damaged, that I could never be normal again, that the rest of my life would just be a shell.
John Marsden
#22. I live in the light,
But carry my dark with me.
John Marsden
#23. A few people would suffer, but a lot of people would be better off.'
'It's just not right,' said Kevin stubbornly.
'Maybe not. But neither's your way of looking at it. There doesn't have to be a right side and a wrong side. both sides can be right, or both sides can be wrong ...
John Marsden
#24. The Bible just said 'Thou shalt not kill', then told hundreds of stories of people killing each other and becoming heroes, like David with Goliath.
John Marsden
#25. There are some things that once you've lost, you never get back. Innocence is one. Love is another. I guess childhood is a third.
John Marsden
#26. If you have blank spots instead of stories for part of your life, then that would be a pretty serious thing I think.
John Marsden
#27. The human eye doesn't look above its own height.
John Marsden
#28. I don't want them hanging a double murder on me. It wouldn't look good on my school record.
John Marsden
#29. This is the most complicated relationship since Romeo and Juliet," she complained. "You're
both hopeless. I mean, what is the big problem? You love him. He adores you. You get together and live happily ever after. Any
questions? No, of course not. That'll be ten dollars, thank you.
John Marsden
#30. Well, I've learnt this much: it doesn't matter
what it costs, it's worth paying the price. You can't live cheap
and you can't live for nothing. Pay the price and be proud you've
paid it, that's what I reckon.
John Marsden
#31. I guess you can't live at full-on intensity forever. Lying on the bed of my cell in the dark, trembling, waiting for the soldiers to come in and shoot me - you just can't keep doing that. There's something in the human spirit that won't let you live that way.
John Marsden
#32. Instead of blaming us, find your true enemy. And, where the offence is, there let the great axe fall.
John Marsden
#33. Name three types of olives."
"Olives! I wouldn't know one type!"
"Well, there are three. You can get green ones, you can get black ones, or you can get stuffed.
John Marsden
#34. A beggar who goes fishing may use a worm which has feasted on a king as his bait. And the fisherman may eat the fish caught with that bait. What does this tells us? Well, it tells us that a king may progress through the guts of a pauper.
John Marsden
#35. A farm is just an accumulation of stories really. Same with people ...
"A farmer's footsteps are the best fertiliser," Dad used to say, which just means that the more you walk around your place the better everything seems to grow and flourish.
John Marsden
#36. We weren't creatures from another planet. We were creatures from Hell.
John Marsden
#37. It's good to keep changing your mind. It shows you're thinking. I'll only stop changing my mind when I'm dead. And maybe not even then.
John Marsden
#38. We believed we were safe. That was the big fantasy.
John Marsden
#39. I didn't confess how wrecked I was. Let them keep thinking I was Superwoman if they wanted. I knew the truth.
John Marsden
#40. When you're scared you can either give in to the panic and let your mind fall apart, or you can take charge of your mind and think brave.
John Marsden
#43. I guess our fate is up to us now. And we've
been there before, of course. There's something quite comforting
about it in a strange way. We've learnt a few things. We know we've
got a few things going for us. A bit of imagination, a bit of guts
sometimes, a bit of spark.
John Marsden
#44. It's funny about a face, how big a difference it makes. I mean, one day you look in th mirror and you think, yeah, that's me, that's my face. And then another day ... you think, that's not me, that's not my face. So am I my face? I mean is that all I am?
John Marsden
#45. If I have to do battle with you a thousand times to prove my point, I'll do it.'
The queen unwisely asked, 'But to prove what point, my dear Hamlet?'
'That I loved Ophelia! Fifty thousand brothers, with all the love they can summon, would not equal my love for here. Ophelia, Ophelia.
John Marsden
#46. Oh, Homer! You don't have to play dumb anymore! You're not at school now.
John Marsden
#47. We'll never feel safe again, and so it's bye-bye innocence. It's been nice knowing you, but you're gone now.
John Marsden
#48. Anyway, I should have known better about the roses. Whatever Mum planted grew eventually. Take me for instance.
John Marsden
#49. My survival was up to me. I had nothing and I had no one. What I did have, I told myself, was my mind, my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. These were important and powerful things.
John Marsden
#50. So what are violinists?
Well, I think they're really sensitive, and kind of deep.
John Marsden
#51. This is bigger than a fart in a bathtub, you know.
John Marsden
#53. I was deeply impressed by the fact that my life could lose three days without my having any awareness of it. Maybe this was a preview of death: continuous visions and dreams and vague glimpses of reality. Only with death you never wake up: you keep having the weird images forever.
John Marsden
#54. I make people uncomfortable. The kind ones get angry because their kindness doesn't work. The unkind ones get angry because they think I'm attacking them.
John Marsden
#55. The Spice Girl morality is the morality of the three-year-old.
John Marsden
#57. Some men run out of stories, of conversation, in no time at all. Either so little has happened to them or, more likely, they are incapable of understanding or retaining what has happened to them, and so they soon find themselves with nothing to say. Such a man makes a terrible companion.
John Marsden
#58. Some people wake up drowsy. Some people wake up energized. I wake up dead.
John Marsden
#59. There's no room for anything else. You forget that you're tired or cold or hungry. You forget that banged-up knee and your aching tooth. You forget the past, and you forget that there's such a thing as a future.
John Marsden
#60. I wondered how long an adult could talk to a kid without using the word "but." About forty seconds'd be the record for most of them and that's on a good day.
John Marsden
#62. I've heard enough about what you want to do; now tell me what needs doing
John Marsden
#63. Chris says his father was born on the corner of straight and narrow ...
John Marsden
#64. The dreams now were simply of staying alive.
John Marsden
#65. Live as though you'll die tomorrow, but farm as though you'll live forever.
John Marsden
#66. They weren't necessarily soldiers, but you didn't have to be soldiers to be affected by it all.
John Marsden
#67. We'd thought that we were among the first humans to invade this basin, but humans had invaded everything, everywhere. They didn't have to walk into a place to invade it.
John Marsden
#68. Action is its own kind of thinking. We had to fight now: these people were a cancer who had crept into our stomachs and infected us all. We had to be surgeons, bold and clever, not thinkers and talkers.
John Marsden
#70. At that age you think boys have as much personality as coat hangers and, you don't notice their looks.
Then you grow up.
John Marsden
#71. The biggest risk is to take no risk. or to take crazy risks.
John Marsden
#72. All these words, words like 'evil' and 'vicious', they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.
John Marsden
#74. They say teenagers can sleep all day. I often used to look at dogs and be amazed by the way they seemed to sleep for twenty hours a day. But I envied them too. It was the kind of lifestyle I could relate to.
We didn't sleep for twenty hours, but we gave it our best shot.
John Marsden
#75. But it was my parents I longed for mostly. I wanted to be a little girl again and cuddle into them, wriggling in between them like I'd done in their bed when I was three or four, snug and warm in the safest place in the world.
Instead I had Hell.
John Marsden
#76. Some people wake up fast. Some people wake up slow. I wake up dead.
John Marsden
#77. Life's harder, the deeper you feel things, was all I could think as I put the books away. Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.
John Marsden
#78. I knew I was breaking about a dozen laws but I guess I had different attitudes to stuff like that since the war. Laws were for the stupid the immature the irresponsible. The inflexible and the narrow-minded. The prejudiced. The obsessive. The lazy and careless and selfish and spoilt. The violent.
John Marsden
#79. How strange it would now - like speaking without a voice. Is that what music is then, a ventriloquist with his doll ?
John Marsden
#80. ...."we saw this big dark red leech hanging off his back.
We were dancing round yelling: 'We'll burn it off! Get the petrol! Stay
still Mr Kassar, you can trust us!'
He wimped out though, and made us use salt. Very boring.
John Marsden
#81. Being brave is a choice you make. You've got to say to yourself: I'm going to think brave. I refuse to think fear or panic.
John Marsden
#82. If people are either mountain people or ocean people then I'm a mountain person. I love the ocean, the few times I get a chance to see it, but I'm a mountain girl.
John Marsden
#83. I've succeeded, I guess, but sometimes maybe to succeed is to fail
John Marsden
#84. There's nothing like the very early morning. It's the sweetness of the air, the sweet coolness; it's the bubbling of the creek which, for some strange reaction, always sounds more energetic than it does later on; it's the gargling of the magpies.
John Marsden
#85. Nothing reaches inside you and grabs you by the guts the way fear does.
John Marsden
#86. Let no stranger intrude here, no invader trespass. This was ours, and this we would defend.
John Marsden
#87. I refuse to think fear. I will think strong. I will think brave.
John Marsden
#88. Don't treat people as you think they are, treat them as you think they are capable of becoming.
John Marsden
#89. Never cry over anything that can't cry over you
John Marsden
#90. What's the Future? It's a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren't the lines we wanted.
John Marsden
#91. It'd be funny if one of them was called Gavin. Funny but irrelevant.
John Marsden
#92. People, shadows, good, bad, Heaven, Hell: all of these were names, labels, that was all. Humans had created these opposites: Nature recognised no opposites. Even life and death weren't opposites in Nature: one was merely an extension of the other.
John Marsden
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