63 Quotes by Patrick White

I have tried to celebrate the park, which means so much to so many of us, in The Eye of the Storm and in some of the shorter novels of The Cockatoos.

If I have not lost my mind I can sometimes hear it preparing to defect

She had begun to read in the beginning as a protection from the frightening and unpleasant things. She continued because, apart from the story, literature brought with it a kind of gentility for which she craved.

I expect we are all jealous of the women in their past, but how much less exciting if the women had not kept the bed warm.

She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.

To understand the stars would spoil their appearance.

To make yourself, it is also necessary to destroy yourself.

The mystery of life is not salved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.

They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn’t notice he was touched, because he wouldn’t have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.