Patrick White Quotes

Above all I was determined to prove that the Australian novel is not necessarily the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism.

In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions…and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves. It was the exaltation of the ‘average’ that made me panic most.

There is nothing like a rain of bombs to start one trying to assess one’s own achievement.

Perhaps true knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind.

The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.

So that in the end there were the trees. The boy walking through them with his head drooping as he increased in stature. Putting out shoots of green thought. So that, in the end, there was no end.