“We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“What's the Future? It's a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren't the lines we wanted.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“I live in the light,
But carry my dark with me.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“Life's harder, the deeper you feel things, was all I could think as I put the books away. Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“When you're scared you can either give in to the panic and let your mind fall apart, or you can take charge of your mind and think brave.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“Life's harder, the deeper you feel things.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“My pen.’ Funny, I wrote that without noticing. ‘The torch’, ‘the paper’, but ‘my pen’. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It’s about the most important thing I own.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“Let no stranger intrude here, no invader trespass. This was ours, and this we would defend.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“The world was quickly forgetting us. And there was little news to report.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“One of the things I find strangest and hardest is that we were having such conversations. We should have been talking about discos and electronic mail and exams and bands. How could this have been happening to us? How could we have been huddled in the dark bush, cold and hungry and terrified, talking about who we should kill? We had no preparation for this, no background, no knowledge. We didn’t know if we were doing the right thing, ever. We didn’t know anything. We were just ordinary teenagers, so ordinary we were boring. Overnight they’d pulled the roof off our lives. And after they’d pulled off the roof they’d come in and torn down the curtains, ripped up the furniture, burnt the house and thrown us into the night, where we’d been forced to run and hide and live like wild animals. We had no foundations, and we had no secure walls around our lives any more. We were living in a strange long nightmare, where we had to make our own rules, invent new values, stumble around blindly, hoping we weren’t making too many mistakes. We clung to what we knew and what we thought was right, but all the time those things too were being stripped from us. I didn’t know if we’d be left with nothing, or if we’d left with a new set of rules and attitudes and behaviours, so that we weren’t able to recognise ourselves any more. We could end up as new, distorted, deformed creatures, with only a few physical resemblances to the people we once were.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“A bad black horse steals
Steals into my head
And moves across the landscape
Of my mind, while I sleep.
He does what he likes in there.
Next day I feel
The damage.
In the quiet mist
I watch her go.
It feels like snow.
There's a feeling that I get.
I walk back home
Sad and slow.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“It was the world-without-adults daydream. In my dream I'd never quite figured out where the adults went but we kids were free to roam, to help ourselves to anything we wanted. We'd pick up a Merc from a showroom when we wanted wheels, and when it ran out of petrol we'd get another one. We'd change cars the way I change socks. We'd sleep in different mansions every night, going to new houses instead of putting new sheets on the beds. Life would be one long party.
Yes, that had been the dream.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“Night started to fall, then it fell, till it was lying all over the ground.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“Being brave is a choice you make. You've got to say to yourself: I'm going to think brave. I refuse to think fear or panic.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“Death comes walking across the countryside swinging that scythe, and he might get you or he might not.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
John Marsden
Born place: in Australia
Born date September 27, 1950
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“I can no longer take war or promotion or big income or a large house seriously. I reject empire and Vietnam and placing a man on the moon. I deny time payments and looking like the girl next door and church weddings and a great deal more. If you want to blame such rejection on grass, you can do so. I charge it to awakening.”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Drifters
“Sometimes I sets and thinks, and sometimes I just sets.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, quote from The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume II: Microcosmic God
“I don’t believe he casts people into eternal flame for fornication, as you pointed out. Or for believing in a version of him that is a little off the mark. I believe—or, I want to believe—he considers the worst sins to be those we commit in his name.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Live by Night
“Grossman, perhaps tiring slightly of journalism, seems to have longed to convey his thoughts and feelings about the war in fictional form. At this stage, when the Soviet Union was fighting for its life, his ideas were very close to that of the Party line. It was only at Stalingrad, a year later, that his view of the Stalinist regime began to change. This outline, may well have formed part of the idea for The People Immortal, his novel written and published the following year...”
― Vasily Grossman, quote from A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army
“He awakened to the simple truth that it is never what a person says or does that affects him, it is his reaction to what is said or done that matters.”
― Joseph Murphy, quote from THE POWER OF YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND (Tamil)
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In the Country of La...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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