David Malouf Quotes & Sayings

A life wasn't for anything. It simply was. — David Malouf

What does it mean to be ,' he thought, 'except to be known? — David Malouf

It was a flame in the boy, this power he had acquired over the world they moved in. He gave up being contemptuous, since he was the one now who "knew things", assumed an easy, masculine air that he had picked up by imitation from his elders, and was so good at it that it looked like nature. And what of me? she thought. I am as brave as he is. I could do all that. Being in possession now of so many skills, and the code that went with them and belonged to men, he had put himself beyond reach. And she was stille, if only by an inch now, the taller!
She resented bitterly the provision his being a boy had made for him to exert himself and act. He had no need to fret or bother himself; only to be patient and let himself grow and fill out the lines of what had been laid up for him. — David Malouf

In time, most children stop being puzzled in this way. They settle in. The world around them, as it becomes familiar and daily, becomes ordinary. But for writers, like children who have never quite grown up, life retains a quality of strangeness; it remains a matter of questions for which there are no satisfactory answers, of hidden motives, displaced explanations, subtle concealments and mysteries. Eavesdropping of one kind or another, keeping an eye open and an ear cocked, even in public places, for the giveaway facial expression or gesture, the revealing word, becomes a settled habit for the writer, a necessary part of his professional equipment: the laying down of small scraps of information, of observation or experience, for future use. — David Malouf

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

Only slowly, after long watching, did he begin to distinguish the small signs that made them trackable: the ball of gristle in the corner of a man's cheek, which you could actually hear the soft click of if you listened for it; the swelling of the wormlike vein in a man's temple just below the hairline, the tightening of the crow's feet round his eyes, the almost imperceptible flicker of pinkish, naked lids; a deepening of the hollow above a man's collarbone as his throat muscles tenses, and some word he was holding back, because it was unspeakable, went up and down there, a lump of something he could neither swallow nor cough up.He saw these things now, and what astonished him was how much they gave away. — David Malouf

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

Toccata II
A man sits pen in hand, paper
before him. What is on his mind
he will set down now, the word not to be spoken
lightly. As if of all
his words this was the one that touched the heart
of things and made touch
the last sense of all as it was the first, and the word
that speaks it loaded
with all that came strongest, a planet's-worth
of sunlight, cooling green, the close comfort
of kind. It is the world he must set down
now, also lightly, each thing
changed yet as it was: in so many fumblings traced back
to the print of his fingertips still warm upon it, the warmth
that came when he was touched.
The last, as he sets it down, no more than
a breath, though much
that is still to be grasped may turn upon it. — David Malouf

Words his soul danced to. — David Malouf

I write not to record what I think but to discover what I think — David Malouf

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

Shy Gifts
Shy gifts that come to us from a world that may not
even know we're here. Windfalls, scantlings.
Breaking a bough like breathy flute-notes, a row
of puffed white almond-blossom, the word in hiding
among newsprint that has other news to tell.
In a packed aisle at the supermarket, I catch
the eye of a wordless one-year-old, whale-blue,
unblinking. It looks right through me, recognising
what? Wisely mistrustful but unwisely
impulsive as we are, we take these givings
as ours and meant for us - why else so leap
to receive them? - and go home lighter
of step to the table set, the bed turned down, the book
laid open under the desk-lamp, pages astream
with light like angels' wings, arched for take-off. — David Malouf

I've long come to the conclusion that when people say they can't put a book down, they don't mean they're interested in what's happening next; they mean they are so mesmerised by the writer's voice and the relationship that has been established that they don't want to break that. That's what I feel when I read, and I'm sure now that that's what's going on in the relationship between the reader and the writing. — David Malouf

All the things we achieve are things we have first of all imagined. — David Malouf

I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up. — David Malouf

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

Scarlet! It is the first colour I have seen in months. Or so it seems. Scarlet. A little wild poppy, of a red so sudden it made my blood stop. I kept saying the word over and over to myself, scarlet, as if the word, like the colour, had escaped me till now, and just saying it would keep the little windblown flower in sight. — David Malouf

What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change? — David Malouf

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

That is what life meant, a unique presence, and it was essential in every creature. — David Malouf

There is more to darkness than nightfall. — David Malouf

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

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

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

I now have of a life that stretches beyond the limits of measurable time. — David Malouf

Till they arrived no other lives had been lived here. It made the air that much thinner, harder to breathe. She had not understood, till she came to a place where it was lacking, the extent to which her sense of the world had to do with the presence of those who had been there before, leaving signs of their passing and spaces still warm with their breath - a threshold worn with the coming and going of feet, hedges between fields that went back a thousand years, and the names even further; most of all, the names on headstones, which were their names, under which lay the bones that had made their bones and given them breath. — David Malouf

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

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

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

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

There is law enough all about us
in almanack and season, anniversary
days come round, the round earth's carnivale
of chimes and recessionals.
Good to be included
there. Good also what is not
fixed or sure even,
the second breath of being
here when the May-bush
snows in mid-September, as giddy
happenstance leads us
this way into
a lost one's arms, or that way
deeper into the maze. — David Malouf

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 earth's warmth under me, as I stretch out at night, is astonishing. It is like the warmth of another body that has absorbed the sun all day and now gives out again its store of heat. It is softer, darker than I could ever have believed, and when I take a handful of it and smell its extraordinary odors, I know suddenly what it is I am composed of, as if the energy that is in this fistful of black soil had suddenly opened, between my body and it, as between it and the green stalks, some corridor along which our common being flowed. — David Malouf

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

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

We are free at last to believe in ourselves. — David Malouf

History is forever unfinished, forever in process; endless because our needs are endless. — David Malouf

I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six. I am there. — David Malouf

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

All over him a flaking, and the flakes tiny creatures, clawed and with mouths, all light, that crawled into the cracks that had been opened in him, seeking bone. Only when a shadow of cloud passed over did the many mouths of the light desist.

Tries to hold it, the shadow; to make at least the memory of it last on his flesh, and cool and calm the furious activity all over the surface of him. But his mind lets the cloud slide away like everything else it has held. All that remains in his skull, behind the blind eyes, is sky, and that too burns, shakes out flame. Cloud after cloud rolls over, touches, cools, and is gone. Beyond hold. — David Malouf

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

So many things were new. Everything changed. The past would not hold and could not be held. — David Malouf

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

Silence is a form of communication. Speech divides us. — David Malouf

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

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

Enemies, like friends, told you who you were. — David Malouf

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

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

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

Or does not knowing make him free? — David Malouf

I have heard no word of my own language; I am rendered dumb. — David Malouf

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