Quotes by Patrick White

“Conversation is imperative if gaps are to be filled, and old age, it is the last gap but one.”

“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.”

“Well, good luck to you, kid! Im going to write the Great Australian Novel.”

“We had probably three charges filed in the year and a half the law was in effect ... That roughly indicates the frequency of these offenses.”

“I forget what I was taught. I only remember what I have learnt.”

“St. Marys and Wabash are in one important way very different. Wabash is a college for men; Saint Marys, of course, a college for women. But both share a respect for students, a commitment to education of the whole person, and a calling of all students to greatness.”

“Wabash is one of Americas greatest liberal arts colleges, rich in tradition and even richer in promise and possibilities. To be chosen to lead Wabash to new heights of achievement as its next president is a great honor.”

“I just had a great time out there. When you get chances, youve got to bury them, and I did.”

“We hoped that we could come out and get the first and the energy would pick us up, but they kept getting the bounces.”

“They prevented us from getting that first goal. Had we have gotten that maybe we would have got a little confidence and maybe come back.”

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

They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldnt notice he was touched, because he wouldnt have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

But the purpose and nature are never clearly revealed. Human behaviour is a series of lunges, of which, it is sometimes sensed, the direction is inevitable.

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.

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.