David Malouf QUOTES

2 " The planet, saved for another day, stokes up
its slow-burning gases and toxic dust, gold rift and scarlet

gash that take our breath away; a world at its interminable
show of holy dying. And we go with it, the old

gatherer and hunter. To its gaudy-day, though the contribution
is small, adding our handsel of warm clay. "

― David Malouf , Earth Hour

3 " 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 , The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World (Quarterly Essay #41)

4 " 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 , Ransom

5 " 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 , An Imaginary Life

6 " 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 , An Imaginary Life

7 " What drew him back was something altogether more personal, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing on the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone that he knew would never appear. He had long understood that one of his selves, the earliest and most vulnerable, had never left this place, and this original and clearest view of things could be recovered only through what had first come to him in the glow of its ordinary light and weather...it was the light they appeared in that was the point, and that at least had not changed. "

― David Malouf , Dream Stuff: Stories

8 " 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. "

― David Malouf , An Imaginary Life

9 " So long as we are driven by the need to make up for our needs; by the restless sense that we are not yet fully assured of our place in the world and our hold on its swarming phenomena; so long as there is more to be discovered and made, more to grasp for and make real, we must go on inventing ourselves. "

― David Malouf , The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World (Quarterly Essay #41)

10 " 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. "

― David Malouf , Earth Hour

11 " He had entered the rough world of men, where a man's acts follow him wherever he goes in the form of story. "

― David Malouf , Ransom

12 " 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 , An Imaginary Life

13 " As for the Economy, this new embodiment as I called it of Fate or the Gods, this global power that governs the lives of Chinese workers in village factories, Brazilian miners, children working cocoa plantations in West Africa, sex workers in Mumbai, real estate salesmen in Connecticut, sheep-farmers in Scotland or on the Darling Downs, disembodied voices in call centres in Bangalore, workers in the hospitality industry in Cancun or Venice or Fiji, keeping them fatefully interconnected, in its mysterious way, by laws that do exist, the experts assure us, though they cannot agree on what they are- it is too impersonal, too implacable for us to live comfortably with, or even to catch hold of and defy.
When we were in the hands of the Gods, we had stories that made these distant beings human and brought them close. They got angry, they took our part or turned violently against us. They fell in love with us and behaved badly. They had their own problems and fought with one another, and like us were sometimes foolish. But their interest in us was personal. They watched over us and were concerned though in moments of willfulness or boredom they might also torment us as “wanton boys” do flies. We had our ways of obtaining their help as intermediaries. We could deal with them.
The Economy is impersonal. It lacks manageable dimensions. We have discovered no mythology to account for its moods. Our only source of information about it, the Media and their swarm of commentators, bring us “reports,” but these do not help: a possible breakdown in the system, a new crisis, the descent of Greece, or Ireland or Portugal, like Jove’s eagle, of the IMF. We are kept in a state of permanent low-level anxiety broken only by outbreaks of alarm. "

― David Malouf , The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World (Quarterly Essay #41)

14 " This new lot...they too would go down. They were 'troops' who were about to be 'thrown in,' 'men' in some general's larger plan, 're-enforcements ' and would soon be 'casualties'. They were also Spud, Snow, Skeeter, Blue, Tommo. "

― David Malouf

15 " The prospect of going home again scared them. They couldn't imagine how they could ever settle to it. How they could just walk around the streets and pretend to be normal, look women in the eye again after what they had done and seen, ride on trams, sit at a table with a white cloth, and control their hands and just slowly eat. It was the little things that scared them. The big things you could hide in. It was little ones that gave a man away. "

― David Malouf

16 " I scoffed at such old fashioned notions as duty, patriotism, the military virtues. And here I was, aged fifty, standing on guard at the very edge of the known world. To protect what? A hundred or so mud and wattle huts, three hundred savage strangers who do not even speak my tongue. And, of course, my own skin. "

― David Malouf , An Imaginary Life

17 " 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 , An Imaginary Life

18 " 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

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

― David Malouf , An Imaginary Life

20 " We are free at last to believe in ourselves. "

― David Malouf , An Imaginary Life

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