“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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“It has been my experience, that women possess little or no pride where love affairs are concerned. Pride is a quality often on their lips, but not apparent in their actions.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Towards Zero
“the girl who was so lovely even her father couldn’t resist her.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, quote from Who Fears Death
“Only people who suffer show the ravages of age.”
― Howard Fast, quote from The Immigrants
“De los muchos rostros que (como todos los seres humanos) Alejandra tenía, aquél era el que más le pertenecía a Martín; o, por lo menos, el que más le había pertenecido: era la expresión profunda y un poco triste del que anhela algo que sabe, por anticipado, que es imposible; un rostro ansioso pero ya de antemano desesperanzado, como si la ansiedad (es decir, la esperanza) y la desesperanza pudieran manifestarse a la vez. Y, además, con aquella casi imperceptible pero sin embargo violenta expresión de desdén contra algo, quizá contra Dios o la humanidad entera o, más probablemente, contra ella misma. O contra todo junto. No sólo de desdén, sino de desprecio y hasta de asco.”
― Ernesto Sabato, quote from On Heroes and Tombs
“The Crying Child found a Mountain where others who had suffered had gone to learn to live through letting go. They learned that one must not struggle to change the unchangeable. That the only peace to be found is the peace of acceptance.”
― Hannah Hart, quote from Buffering: Unshared Tales of a Life Fully Loaded
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Ballad: A Gathering...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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
