8 Quotes by Gerald Murnane

...our joys and pleasures are only a compromise between our wants and our circumstances.

The details of what we call our lives go sometimes to form patterns of meaning not unlike those to be found in our preferred sort of fiction.

true fiction is more likely to include what was overlooked or ignored or barely seen or felt at the time of its occurrences but comes continually to mind ten or twenty years afterwards not on account of its having long ago provoked passion or pain but because of its appearing to be part of a pattern of meaning that extends over much of a lifetime

no film could show more than those sights that a man's eyes rested on when he had given up the effort to observe.

I long since decided that the author of a text lacking a narrative presence is guilty of posturing or, more likely, of incompetence.

Every plainsman knows he has to find his place. The man who stays in his native district wishes he had arrived there after a long journey. And the man who travels begins to fear that he may not find a fitting end to his journey. I’ve spent my life trying to see my own place as a journey I never made.

How might a man reorder his conduct if he could be assured that the worth of a perception, a memory, a supposition, was enhanced rather than diminished by its being inexplicable to others? And what could a man not accomplish, freed from any obligation to search for so-called truths apart from those demonstrated by his search for a truth peculiar to him?

There must have been many a man who knew, without leaving his own narrow district of the plains, that his heart enclosed every land he could have travelled to;.