Famous Quotes & Sayings

Colleen McCullough Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 98 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Colleen McCullough.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Pinterest Share on Linkedin

Famous Quotes By Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1304526

Old age is an ordeal, of flesh and mind. Of winding down, of slowing down, of dying cells. It's accepting the loss of physical attractiveness and replacing it with the power and wisdom that can only come with old age. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 693650

Why shouldn't the living cords which lace our being together flick softly against a loved one in the very moment of their unraveling?...Sometimes, all the miles between are as nothing, sometimes, they are narrowed to the little silence between the beats of a heart. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1083557

The bird with the thorn in its breast, it follows an immutable law; it is driven by it knows not what to impale itself, and die singing. At the very instant the thorn enters there is no awareness in it of the dying to come; it simply sings and sings until there is not the life left to utter another note. But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1133720

The feeling of coming home, when she didn't want to come home any more than she wanted the liability of love. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 801405

Give a Greek enough rope and he'll hang everyone else in sight. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 415687

Belief doesn't rest on proof or existence...it rests on faith...without faith there is nothing. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1454184

Living's for those of us who failed. Greedy God, gathering in the good ones, leaving the world to the rest of us, to rot. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1112911

He owe his wife a debt he couldn't hope to pay with any coin save one: open the cage and let the bird fly. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1548863

What was sleep? A blessing, a respite from life, an echo of death, a demanding nuisance? — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 822079

stayed as close to Theatre as she could, working Casualty or Men's; — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1459208

Each of us has something within us which won't be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die. We are what we are, that's all. Like the old Celtic legend of the bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying. Because it has to, its self-knowledge can't affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it's the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don't you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 833933

For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1404901

In The Touch, the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else I've ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1153717

She told fortunes for a living. It's a wacky book and was great fun to write. It is very much a look at what life was like for women in Australia in the 1960's. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 168664

Duty, the most indecent of all obsessions, was only another name for love. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 595330

That's the purpose of old age ... To give us a breathing space before we die, in which to see why we did what we did. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 666035

I hate being on my best behavior. It brings out the absolute worst in me. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1918623

orgy of sampling Europe's charms, she never went back, and that was strange. In his experience people always — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1321692

loved, and indulged to the full extent of her father — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1579677

Suddenly the thought that the end of her life was imminent shocked him; it was one thing to pity someone he didn't know, quite another to face the same dilemma with someone he knew intimately. That was the trouble with beds. They turned strangers into intimates more quickly than ten years of polite teas in parlours. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1850180

You say you love me, but you have no idea what love is; you're just mouthing words you've memorized because you think they sound good! — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1220089

Later on after the war was over the women were to find this constantly; the men who had actually been in the thick of battle never opened their mouths about it, refused to join the ex-soldiers' clubs and leagues, wanted nothing to do with institutions perpetuating the memory of war. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1472724

The Labour Party of today has fits of horrors of the very thought of somebody like me might saying that they bought in white Australia. But I believe they did. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 225501

She looked like the sort of woman most men would want to get to know because they weren't sure what went on inside. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1622212

We are not here together just to make children, Elizabeth. What we're going to do is sanctified by marriage. It's an act of love - of love. Not merely of the flesh, but of the mind and even the soul. There's nothing about it you shouldn't welcome. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1768405

on him at the time of his majority, and was more than enough for his needs. He would live his own life, then, far from Melbourne and parents, carve his own kind of niche. But the imminence — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 275867

He was, he admitted, a man who liked to have his cake and eat it too. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 656392

My husband says it is very good that I have very tiny feet, because they're easier to get in my mouth. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1052737

Corunda Base Hospital itself continued to function on doctors, nurses, domestic staff, food preparers, and ancillary staff in the same old way, so that the patients lived (or died) in relative ignorance of the drama going on at an executive level. Indeed, it was a rare patient even knew that a hospital had executives. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1867409

You just hang onto the thought that every dog has its day, even the bitches — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1130169

There is no doubt that it is more difficult to read and more difficult to write but I still manage. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1904332

Truly God was good, to make man so blind. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 2091087

Luke's not a bad man, or even an unlikable one," she went on. "Just a man. You're all the same, great big hairy moths bashing yourselves to pieces after a silly flame behind a glass so clear your eyes don't see it. And if you do manage to blunder your way inside the glass to fly into the flame, you fall down burned and dead.
While all the time out there in the cool night there's food, and love, and baby moths to get. But do you see it, do you want it? No! It's back after the flame again, beating yourselves senseless until you burn yourselves dead! — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 318604

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 629626

But not we men. We weren't fit to be told. For so you women think, and hug your mysteries, getting your backs on us for the slight God did in not creating you in His image. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1227038

The law should not be a huge and weighty slab which falls upon a man and squashes him into a uniform shape, for men are not uniform. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 2071110

Love isn't truly the body. Love is freedom to roam the heart and mind of the beloved. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1666969

But I'll pin you to the wall on your own weakness, I'll make you sell yourself like any painted whore." Mary Carson to Father Ralph. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 211529

He hadn't wooed her, but had simply claimed her. A gold mine ready to dig. There should have been a period of quiet dinners together, of flowers rather than diamonds, of kisses given after permission to kiss, of a slow awakening that predisposed her to greater intimacies. But no, not the great Alexander Kinross! He had met her, he had married her the next day, and climbed into her bed after one kiss in the church. There to prove himself an animal in her eyes. One mistake after another, that was the story of his relationship with Elizabeth. And Ruby had always meant more. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1920338

Maybe no great man is virtuous. Or good. Perhaps a man rich in those qualities by definition is barred from greatness. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 2115814

Lares of the Crossroads — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1329536

I want to know what they look like, their height, and colouring, physique and speech pattens. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 2174822

There is a legend about a bird which sings only once in it's life, more beautifully than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves it's nest, it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, it impales it's breast on the longest, sharpest thorn. But as it is dying, it rises above it's own agony to outsing the Lark and the Nightingale. The Thornbird pays it's life for that one song, and the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles, as it's best is brought only at the cost of great pain; Driven to the thorn with no knowledge of the dying to come. But when we press the thorn to our breast, we know, we understand.... and still, we do it." ~ Colleen McCullough — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1345470

The Greeks say it's a sin against the gods to love something beyond all reason. And do you remember that they say when someone is loved so, the gods become jealous, and strike the object down in the very fullness of its flower? — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1377747

I stopped this one about two months before federation and I want the next one to be more political. It will deal with the formation of white Australian policy and things like that. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 2162003

How frightening, that one person could mean so much, so many things. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1417306

All that appearance business is crap, and I'm not even going to be bothered arguing with you about it. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1774428

There was some justice in his pain — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 2175840

Perfection in anything is unbearably dull. Myself, I prefer a touch of imperfection. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1424887

Age brought wisdom, but it also brought a genuine gratitude for the happiness of sharing life with someone as much liked as loved. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 2132503

He had always been her baby, her lovely little boy; though she had watched him change and grow with proprietary pride, she had done so with an image of laughing baby superimposed on his maturing face. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1951300

Best of all she liked his eyes, such a translucent golden brown, and so laughing. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1643050

Yet there's something ominous about turning sixty-five. Suddenly old age is not a phenomenon which will occur; it has occurred. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 2076880

There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone's heart. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 2072283

No man sees himself in a mirror as he really is, nor any woman. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1924237

Caesar's kindnesses are conscious, done for Caesar's benefit, and Caesar no longer sees the world as a place wherein magical things can occur. Because they can't. Men and women ruin it with their impulses, desires, thoughtlessness, lack of intelligence and cupidity. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1625954

It's not worth getting upset about, Mrs. Dominic. Down in the city they don't know how the other half lives, and they can afford the luxury of doting on their animals as if they were children. Out here it's different. You'll never see man, woman or child in need of help go ignored out here, yet in the city those same people who dote on their pets will completely ignore a cry of help from a human being. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1481141

Once I've got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I'll check my research. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1540687

she sat rocking his head back and forth, back and forth, until his grief expended itself in emptiness. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 2063537

I escaped the torture of my childhood home by reading. To this day it is still one of my greatest pleasures. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 2007661

In early draft it never satisfied me, and that was when it clicked into place and it went so well as a diary. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 429047

went to the cross eight months before His — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 675289

We're working-class people, which means we don't get rich or have maids. Be content with what you are and what you have. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 669453

Nothing is given without a disadvantage in it, — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 653115

There's a hell of a lot of horny people out there who are not being gratified in the way they should be. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 628834

His sudden and utterly overwhelming panic was over almost before it began; but not quickly enough. In the midst of his brief yet total terror, the King of Pontus shat himself. It went everywhere, solid faeces mixed with what seemed an incredible amount of more liquid bowel contents, a stinking brown mess all over the gold-encrusted purple cloth of his cushion, trickling down the legs of his throne, running down his own legs into the manes of the golden lions upon the flaps of his boots, pooling and plopping on the deck around his feet when he jumped up. And there was nowhere to go! He could not conceal it from the amazed eyes of his attendants and officers, he could not conceal it from the sailors below amidships who had looked up instinctively to make sure their King was safe. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 616171

But work used to be the lot of every man, and now it is rapidly becoming an aristocratic privilege. Men nowadays are more often paid not to work. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 575648

I am writing a sequel to The Touch because I want to further explore the Chinese question that I have raised. There will be more about that in a sequel. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 574405

I can't share your love of God. But I do understand your need to give your life to him. Each of us has within us something that just won't be denied. Something to which we are driven even though it makes us scream aloud to die. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 493047

Rain, rain, rain. Like a benediction from some vast inscrutable hand, long withheld, finally given. The blessed, wonderful rain. For rain meant grass, and grass was life. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 488136

sold into an indentured servitude — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 712818

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 383865

Then God's a bigger poofter than Sweet Willie. "You might be right" said Justine. "He certainly isn't too fond of women, anyway. Second-class, that's us, way back in the Upper Circle. Front Stalls and the Mezzanine, strictly male. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 301051

It's no fun to be a bluestocking in a family of jockstraps. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 287070

Do you realize that you've been married to me for just about half of your entire life?"
Her head came down, her eyes opened wide to stare at him. "Is that all?" she asked. "It seems an eternity".
"Did I say a quiet lion?" Alexander pulled a face. "An eternity with me has turned you into a bitch, my dear". — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 278270

Love and hate are cruel, only liking is kind — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 277888

It's a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 267381

Until you can leave the matter of forgiveness to God, you will not have acquired true humility. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 244180

I think explicit love scenes are a turn off unless it's the kind you read with one hand. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 182293

He best is only bought at the cost of great pain ... or so says the legend — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1005516

Meggie dropped to her knees, scrambling frantically to collect the miniature clothes before more damage was done them, then she began picking among the grass blades where she thought the pearls might have fallen. Her tears were blinding her, the grief in her heart new, for until now she had never owned anything worth grieving for. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1296941

When we press the thorn to our chest we know, we understand, and still we do it. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1291354

Twelve thousand miles of it, to the other side of the world. And whether they came home again or not, they would belong neither here, nor there, for they would have lived on two continents and sampled two different ways of life. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1248862

There's a story ... a legend, about a bird that sings just once in its life. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree ... and never rests until it's found one. And then it sings ... more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. And singing, it impales itself on the longest, sharpest thorn. But, as it dies, it rises above its own agony, to outsing the lark and the nightingale. The thorn bird pays its life for just one song, but the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1235546

father could hope for in a son.To have — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1166223

The best thing about being 40 is that you can appreciate 25-year-old men more. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1164309

I have discovered," he said to Charles Dewy, "that when a man marries, peace of mind and freedom go out of the window."
"Well, old boy," said Charles comfortably, "that's the price we have to pay for having company in our old age and for ensuring that we have heirs to follow us. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1100886

And gradually his memory slipped a little, as memories do, even those with so much love attached to them; as if there is an unconscious healing process within the mind which mends up in spite of our desperate determination never to forget. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1071496

Oh, that feels good! I don't know who invented ties and then insisted a man was only properly dressed when he wore one, but if I ever meet him, I'll strangle him with his own invention — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 1327079

My books and other works are my legacy, and it's a great comfort to know that mine is a legacy of pleasure for other people. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 991528

All that power held dormant, sleeping, only needing the detonation of a touch to trigger a chaos in which mind was subservient to passion, mind's will extinguished in body's will. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 976459

Never forget, Caelius, that a great man makes his luck. Luck is there for everyone to seize. Most of us miss our chances; we're blind to our luck. He never misses a chance because he's never blind to the opportunity of the moment. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 953772

The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 894724

Dr. Murray made it clear to me before I left that a woman who enhoys the Act is as loose as a harlot. God gives pleasure in it only to husbands. Women are the source of evil and temptation, therefore women are to blame when men fall into fleshly error. It was Eve who seduced Adam, Eve who entered into league with the serpent, who was the Devil in disguise. So the only pleasure women are allowed is in their children. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 858910

If you love people, they kill you. If you need people, they kill you. They do I tell you! — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 802701

It's a woman's book but I think the men will read it too. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 792075

Though they were very dissimilar in character, they also shared many tastes and appetites, and those they didn't share they tolerated in each other with instinctive respect, as a necessary spice of difference. They knew each other very well indeed. Her natural tendency was to deplore human failings in others and ignore them in herself; his natural tendency was to understand and forgive human failings in others, and be merciless upon them in himself. She felt herself invincibly strong; he knew himself perilously weak. — Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough Quotes 765263

Why is it, Caesar, that there's always a man like Lucius Metellus?" "If there were not, Antonius, this world might work better. Though if this world worked better, there'd be no place in it for men like me," said Caesar. — Colleen McCullough