Peter Carey · 464 pages
Rating: (6.6K votes)
“I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Parrot and Olivier in America
“I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Parrot and Olivier in America
“What a torture to hear that a life had been available to me that I had not been man enough to live.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Parrot and Olivier in America
“Would you rather have the lords and nobles back? What is Democracy for? Not so we can rob each other. Or cheat.' I said cheat and felt the teeth in it, the cleat, the cut, the eat.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Parrot and Olivier in America
“The seamen had whitewashed the smoky ceilings of the ward, and that dear homely smell carried the vividness of thatch and lumpy walls and stew given from the goodness of a stranger's heart. But that was all there was of comfort, and the salt air had turned from cold to warm in the passing of a life, an afternoon.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Parrot and Olivier in America
“[Democracy] is as without plans as it is without energy, as incapable of harm as it is incapable of good. It is powerless and passive. It lets society marcher tout seul without trying to direct it. Well, in the present state of affairs, it is perfect, no? In order to prosper? America does not need either leadership or deep-laid plans or great efforts, but liberty and still more liberty. The reason for this is that no one yet has any interest in abusing liberty. but wait, monsieur. It may take a century but le fou viendra.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Parrot and Olivier in America
Peter Carey
Born place: in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia
Born date May 7, 1943
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“I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises.
Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was,
I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat.
I was never convinced of what I believed in.
I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through.
Words were my only truth.
When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“That's right. I'm in charge now. You might be the Master of this infernal school, but you are not my Master and you will never be. You said it yourself: the Storian won't write because it is waiting for my choice, not yours. I choose whether I take your ring. I choose whether this is The End. I choose whether this world lives or dies. And I'm happy to watch it burn to dust if you expect a slave instead of a queen.”
― Soman Chainani, quote from The Last Ever After
“And I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.”
― Eugene O'Neill, quote from The Iceman Cometh
“One of the first of the considerations that occurred to me was that there is very often less perfection in works composed of several portions, and carried out by the hands of various masters, than in those on which one individual alone has worked. Thus we see that buildings planned and carried out by one architect alone are usually more beautiful and better proportioned than those which many have tried to put in order and improve, making use of old walls which were built with other ends in view.”
― René Descartes, quote from Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy
“We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from The Dosadi Experiment
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