Patrick White Quotes & Sayings

Mrs. Trotter made a sincere though wrong sound, while opening her handbag to look for help. — Patrick White

So that, in the end, there was no end. — Patrick White

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

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

At times his arrogance did resolve itself into simplicity, though it was difficult, especially for strangers, to distinguish these occasions. — Patrick White

There's nothing so inhuman as a human being. — Patrick White

His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it. — Patrick White

But achievements differ in different men. It is not for me, unfortunately so, to build a solid house and live in it the kind of life that is lived in such houses. That is why' - and he began guzzling his wine - 'it is disturbing,' he said. 'Honest people can destroy most effectually such foundations as some of us have. — Patrick White

The map? I will first make it. — Patrick White

She would have liked to love. It was terrible to think she had never loved her son as a man. Sometimes her hands would wrestle together. They were supple, rather plump hands, broad and not yet dry. But wrestling like this together, they were papery and dried-up. Then she would force herself into some deliberate activity or speak tenderly to her good husband, offering him things to eat, and seeing to his clothes. She loved her husband. Even after the drudgery of love she could still love him. But sometimes she lay on her side and said, I have not loved him enough, not yet, he has not seen the evidence of love. It would have been simpler if she had been able to turn and point to the man their son, but she could not. — Patrick White

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I have not lost my mind I can sometimes hear it preparing to defect — Patrick White

Life is full of alternatives but no choice. — Patrick White

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

He himself, he realized, had always been most abominably frightened, even at the height of his divine power, a frail god upon a rickety throne, afraid of opening letters, of making decisions, afraid of the instinctive knowledge in the eyes of mules, of the innocent eyes of good men, of the elastic nature of the passions, even of the devotion he had received from some men, and one woman, and dogs. — Patrick White

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

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

Human relationships are vast as deserts: they demand all daring, she seemed to suggest. — Patrick White

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

To understand the stars would spoil their appearance. — Patrick White

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

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

Voss could always, if necessary, fail to understand. But wounds will wince, especially in the salt air. He was smiling and screwing up his eyes at the great theatre of light and water. Some pitied him. Some despised him for his funny appearance of a foreigner. None, he realized with a tremor of anger, was conscious of his strength. Mediocre, animal men never do guess at the power of rock or fire, until the last moment before those elements reduce them to - nothing. This, the palest, the most transparent of words, yet comes closest to being complete. — Patrick White

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

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

To make yourself, it is also necessary to destroy yourself. — Patrick White

In general,' Voss replied, 'it is necessary to communicate without knowledge of the language. — Patrick White

The knot of her hands and the pulses in her throat rejected any possibility that their meeting might be a casual one. But, of course, she could not explain, nor was her face of any more assistance than her tongue; in fact, as she herself knew, in moments of stress she could resemble a congested turkey. — Patrick White

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

To kiss and to kill are similar words to eyes that focus with difficulty. — Patrick White

Human behavior is a series of lunges, of which, it is sometimes sensed, the direction is inevitable. — Patrick White

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

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

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

There are moments when the eyes flow into each other. Then the souls are wrapped around each other across a distance — Patrick White

I am compelled into this country. — Patrick White

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

No animal suffers worse than a human being. — Patrick White

Life doesn't end on the kitchen floor while there is the will to dance. — Patrick White

In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature. — Patrick White

Such was the texture of her marble.
[In a description of Laura Trevelyan.] — Patrick White

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

Poetry resists academic pretension, just as the mystery of religious faith evaporates on contact with dogma. — Patrick White

It was Sunday, and Mumma had gone next door with Lena and the little ones. Under the pepper tree in the yard Pa was sorting, counting, the empty bottles he would sell back: the bottles going clink clink as Pa stuck them in the sack. The fowls were fluffing in the dust and sun: that crook-neck white pullet Mumma said she would hit on the head if only she had the courage to; but she hadn't. — Patrick White

My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage. — Patrick White

I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table. — Patrick White

If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others. — Patrick White

Reason finally holds a gun at its head - and does not always miss. — Patrick White

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

I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while the callous see us as dispensable objects, like broken furniture or dead flowers. For the young we scarcely exist unless we are unavoidable members of the same family, farting, slobbering, perpetually mislaying teeth and bifocals. — Patrick White