Patrick White Quotes

…stones, even, are smoother for the dust.

Two people do not lose themselves at the identical moment, or else they might find each other, and be saved. It is not as simple as that.

"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."

— Los ateos, por lo general, lo son por razones mezquinas — aseveró Voss — . La más mezquina de todas ellas estriba en su propia falta de grandeza espiritual, que les impide concebir la idea de un Poder Divino.

The princess fell against the bed, groping through the scents of Dettol and baby powder, to embrace, deeper than her mother, her own childhood.

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.

The past is desirable, more often than not, because it can make no demands.

So he went down through the house, its silence alive with clocks, suggestions of subterfuge, the blatant echoes of downright lies, together with hints of the exasperating, unknowable truth.

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.

When the nurse had closed the door the princess felt imprisoned, not only in the room, but in her own body. In her state of foreboding she reached out for the glass of barley water Sister Badgery had removed, and tried to find comfort in sips of that mawkish stuff. She could see herself in one of the looking-glasses with which her blind mother still kept herself surrounded. If the princess had not been so terrified of what the next moment could hold, she might have noticed that her own eyes were deep and lustrous: beautiful in fact; but in the circumstances her mind could only flutter through imagined eventualities. Actually Mrs Hunter was enjoying the luxury of being alone and perfectly silent with somebody she loved. (They did love each other, didn’t they? You could never be sure about other people; sometimes you found they had hated you all their lives.) This state of perfect stillness was not unlike what she enjoyed in her relationship with Sister de Santis, though in essence it was different; with the night nurse she was frequently united in a worship of something too vast and selfless to describe even if your mind had been completely compos whatever it is. This other state of unity in perfect stillness, which she hoped she was beginning to enjoy with Dorothy, she had experienced finally with Alfred when she returned to ‘Kudjeri’ to nurse him in his last illness. There were moments when their minds were folded into each other without any trace of the cross-hatching of wilfulness or desire to possess.

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.

History is not acceptable until it has been sifted for the truth.

For several hours we were thrown and battered — till suddenly calm felt — the calmest calm I have ever experienced at sea. God had willed us to enter the eye — you know about it? the still centre of the storm — where we lay at rest — surrounded by hundreds of seabirds, also resting on the water.

they were both shocked, if not positively alarmed, by an interruption to their celebration. The door opened. ‘Sister, can she be seen?’ It was Mr Wyburd in something too loud for a whisper and less than his usual grammar. ‘The princess has arrived. Her daughter.’ As if this were not enough, a second figure was pushing rustling past the one at the door: for Mrs Hunter it was sound perfume joy despair; whereas Sister Badgery saw a tall thin hatless woman, somewhere around fifty (to be on the kind side) her dress unsurprising except for its simplicity and the pearls bounding about around her neck, and on her bosom, as she half ran half staggered. A princess shouldn’t run, the nurse recovered herself enough to disapprove; and she shouldn’t have a horse face. But Dorothy floundered, imperviously, on. ‘O mon Dieu, aidez-moi !’ she gasped, before assuming another of her selves, or voices, to utter, ‘Mother!’ and lower, ‘Mum!’ Then, by act of special grace, a blind was drawn over the expression the intruder was wearing for this old mummy propped up in bed, a thermometer sticking out of its mouth; if life were present, it was the life generated by jewels with which the rigid claws were loaded.

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.