Joseph Furphy Quotes

Farce is the grimmest of all tragedy; it is the blind jollity of an Irish wake, with the silent guest none the less present because unassertive.

His one positive quality was mendacity. ... He could lie. His style was ornate, yet reposeful; microscopically exact, yet large and sublime. You could sit down and rest in the cool shade of one of his fabrications.

The gods will give us some faults to make us men; therefore no man is up to the husband-ideal of a loving woman. The bachelor may reach this standard-for why shouldn't he be magnanimous, and mettlesome, and debonair; prepared to do all that may become a man, and sometimes even things that don't? And if he should fall a trifle short of the real Mackay-a contingency that you may safely count upon-he is in no way compelled to flaunt his own worthlessness before the feminine eye.

... each man, be he king or beggar, is a little world of his own. If he be swayed by a female, as kings and beggars frequently are, he is an extremely little world.

Now, I have a theory that women do not love their husbands ... I hold that married life is a long-drawn ordeal, which no man short of a Chevalier Bayard has any business to face ...

... I noticed both women's eyes fixed on my face, with a disconcerting interest in the casual gossip. It is humiliating when you feel yourself expected to say something good, and a swift reconnaissance of the subject shows you no opening for anything beyond what a nobleman might drivel. Moreover, I was fresh from the pastoral regions, where etiquette demands frank, unsolicited, and copious comment on the merits or demerits of some absent person ...