Malouf Quotes

#1. I want to grow up to be Tom Keneally or David Malouf: still in the game, relevant, putting out quality work, and paying tax aged 78 and 80.

Nick Earls

#2. And if other old men must be willing, at the end, to push up off their deathbed and adventure out into the unknown, how much more willing must that man be whose whole life has been just such a daily exercise of adventuring, even in the stillness of his own garden? I mean, the poet.

David Malouf

#3. We are free at last to believe in ourselves.

David Malouf

#4. All the things we achieve are things we have first of all imagined.

David Malouf

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

David Malouf

#6. The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact.

David Malouf

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

David Malouf

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Silence is a form of communication. Speech divides us.

David Malouf

#11. There is more to darkness than nightfall.

David Malouf

#12. 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.

David Malouf

#13. 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.

David Malouf

#14. History is forever unfinished, forever in process; endless because our needs are endless.

David Malouf

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

David Malouf

#16. Now as I began to sort through his "effects" it occurred to me how little I had really known him ... I had forced upon my father the character that fitted most easily with my image of myself; to have had to admit to any complexity in him would have compromised my own.

David Malouf

#17. 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

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

David Malouf

#19. Enemies, like friends, told you who you were.

David Malouf

#20. A life wasn't for anything. It simply was.

David Malouf

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

David Malouf

#22. With all those prizes the most interesting thing is getting on to the shortlist, because that tells you who people see as your peers.

David Malouf

#23. What does it mean to be ,' he thought, 'except to be known?

David Malouf

#24. 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.

David Malouf

#25. Still the fact remains, he had me hooked. As he had, of course, from the beginning. I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met.

David Malouf

#26. 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.

David Malouf

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

David Malouf

#28. 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.

David Malouf

#29. Or does not knowing make him free?

David Malouf

#30. I write not to record what I think but to discover what I think

David Malouf

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

David Malouf

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. Words his soul danced to.

David Malouf

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

David Malouf