Marcus Clarke Quotes

I am not a teetotaller — at least, not now. I used to be, but my constitution is not strong, and I could not stand the dissipation.

To describe a tempest of the elements is not easy, but to describe a tempest of the soul is impossible.

I have examined you long enough. I have read your heart, and written out your secrets! You are but a shell—the shell that holds a corrupted and sinful heart. He shall live; you shall die!

Friendship, if you know how to work it, is better than a cousin in Parliament.

Men change their dispositions as they change their climate.

Everything he touched turned to gold. When he married an heiress even she died of the yellow fever.

It is no use borrowing if you mean to pay. There have been more men ruined by 'temporary accommodation' than anything else.

Borrowing may be reduced to a Science, or elevated to an Art. Borrowing an umbrella is a science; borrowing half-a-crown is an art. The man who begins with an umbrella may get to half-a-crown, or even five shillings.Some men are born borrowers, and some have borrowing thrust upon them; and some thrust borrowing upon other people. I made a man lend me twenty pounds for three months, by telling him that I would pay him punctually, and writing my name on a piece of paper. There is always a fool to be found somewhere. Sometimes lenders become unpleasant. One lender put me into gaol, and said I was a swindler. He had no appreciation for art.

The Australian black is as far removed from and Chingachook, as Uncas and Chingachook are from reality. ... An Australian Romeo would bear his Juliet off with the blow of a club, and Juliet would prepare herself for her bridal by "greasing herself from head to foot with the kidney-fat of her lover's rival." Poor Paris! ... No genius among them has ever invented a net or a snare. ... A child every two years is considered enough for any reasonable mother, and should she indulge in more, the indignant father cracks its skull against the nearest tree. Nothing is new, we see,—not even Social Science.

Friends as a rule are a mistake.

About a hundred and seventy miles to the south of this mill-race lies Van Diemen's Land, fertile, fair, and rich, rained upon by the genial showers from the clouds which, attracted by the Frenchman's Cap, Wyld's Crag, or the lofty peaks of the Wellington and Dromedary range, pour down upon the sheltered valleys their fertilizing streams. No parching hot wind—the scavenger, if the torment, of the continent—blows upon her crops and corn. The cool south breeze ripples gently the blue waters of the Derwent, and fans the curtains of the open windows of the city which nestles in the broad shadow of Mount Wellington. The hot wind, born amid the burning sand of the interior of the vast Australian continent, sweeps over the scorched and cracking plains, to lick up their streams and wither the herbage in its path, until it meets the waters of the great south bay; but in its passage across the straits it is reft of its fire, and sinks, exhausted with its journey, at the feet of the terraced slopes of Launceston.

As Mr Burnett said to me long ago, 'Q———, you will never be one of us. You have ruined your constitution by early temperance.'

I have had many friends, like the hare in the fable, but most of them didn't pay expenses. Friendship is like mining; sometimes you drop into a good thing, but the majority of places are duffers.

Distrust the men who make bargains. They are a disgrace to humanity. No man ever saw a dog swap a bone with another dog.

I used to drink so that the publicans, when they went out of business, used to sell me among the valuable fixtures.