Top 48 Patrick White Quotes
#1. To make yourself, it is also necessary to destroy yourself.
Patrick White
#2. Mrs. Trotter made a sincere though wrong sound, while opening her handbag to look for help.
Patrick White
#3. I mean one can be so remote in spirit from one's actual father -or mother- it's as though one doesn't belong to them. Spiritually," he dared, "one can be someone else's child.
Patrick White
#4. 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.
Patrick White
#5. Human behavior is a series of lunges, of which, it is sometimes sensed, the direction is inevitable.
Patrick White
#6. Human relationships are vast as deserts: they demand all daring, she seemed to suggest.
Patrick White
#7. To kiss and to kill are similar words to eyes that focus with difficulty.
Patrick White
#8. I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.
Patrick White
#9. Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
Patrick White
#11. 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.
Patrick White
#12. There are moments when the eyes flow into each other. Then the souls are wrapped around each other across a distance
Patrick White
#13. I think it is impossible to explain faith. It is like trying to explain air, which one cannot do by dividing it into its component parts and labeling them scientifically. It must be breathed to be understood.
Patrick White
#14. Such was the texture of her marble.
[In a description of Laura Trevelyan.]
Patrick White
#15. When I was rising eighteen I persuaded my parents to let me return to Australia and at least see whether I could adapt myself to life on the land before going up to Cambridge.
Patrick White
#16. At times his arrogance did resolve itself into simplicity, though it was difficult, especially for strangers, to distinguish these occasions.
Patrick White
#18. The mystery of life is not salved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.
Patrick White
#19. 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.
Patrick White
#20. Life doesn't end on the kitchen floor while there is the will to dance.
Patrick White
#21. His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.
Patrick White
#22. 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.
Patrick White
#23. She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.
Patrick White
#24. 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.
Patrick White
#25. In general,' Voss replied, 'it is necessary to communicate without knowledge of the language.
Patrick White
#26. I expect we are all jealous of the women in their past, but how much less exciting if the women had not kept the bed warm.
Patrick White
#27. If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.
Patrick White
#29. 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.
Patrick White
#30. If I have not lost my mind I can sometimes hear it preparing to defect
Patrick White
#31. You have taken the important, essential core of the apple, including (one must not forget) the nasty pips, and scales (I do not know what you call those little things) which must be spat out.
Patrick White
#32. My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage.
Patrick White
#34. Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty.
Patrick White
#36. I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on.
Patrick White
#37. In spite of holidays when I was free to visit London theatres and explore the countryside, I spent four very miserable years as a colonial at an English school.
Patrick White
#38. 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.
Patrick White
#39. And the cavern of fire was enormous, labyrinthine, that received the man. He branched and flamed, glowed and increased, and was suddenly extinguished in the little puffs of smoke and tired thoughts.
Patrick White
#40. Poetry resists academic pretension, just as the mystery of religious faith evaporates on contact with dogma.
Patrick White
#41. Reason finally holds a gun at its head - and does not always miss.
Patrick White
#42. In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.
Patrick White
#44. I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table.
Patrick White
#45. To understand the stars would spoil their appearance.
Patrick White
#46. But the boy was not cheated by her ignorance. He was not intensely interested in answers, the things themselves were enough. So he ran on, holding the leaf by its twig, or feather by its quill, and whereas his mother thought mostly of arriving, discovery kept him in a state of endless being.
Patrick White
#47. 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.
Patrick White
#48. As a result of the asthma I was sent to school in the country, and only visited Sydney for brief, violently asthmatic sojourns on my way to a house we owned in the Blue Mountains.
Patrick White
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