Voss Patrick White Quotes

To understand the stars would spoil their appearance.

If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.

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 make yourself, it is also necessary to destroy yourself.

The map? I will first make it.

Human relationships are vast as deserts: they demand all daring, she seemed to suggest.

I am compelled into this country.

His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.

At times his arrogance did resolve itself into simplicity, though it was difficult, especially for strangers, to distinguish these occasions.

To kiss and to kill are similar words to eyes that focus with difficulty.

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross.

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was—perhaps rightly—scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century.

Such was the texture of her marble. [In a description of Laura Trevelyan.]

In general,' Voss replied, 'it is necessary to communicate without knowledge of the language.

…stones, even, are smoother for the dust.

He himself, he realized, had always been most abominably frightened, even at the height of his divine power, a frail god upon a rickety throne, afraid of opening letters, of making decisions, afraid of the instinctive knowledge in the eyes of mules, of the innocent eyes of good men, of the elastic nature of the passions, even of the devotion he had received from some men, and one woman, and dogs.

But the purpose and nature are never clearly revealed. Human behaviour is a series of lunges, of which, it is sometimes sensed, the direction is inevitable.

The past is desirable, more often than not, because it can make no demands.

History is not acceptable until it has been sifted for the truth.

You have taken the important, essential core of the apple, including (one must not forget) the nasty pips, and scales (I do not know what you call those little things) which must be spat out.

—Los ateos, por lo general, lo son por razones mezquinas —aseveró Voss—. La más mezquina de todas ellas estriba en su propia falta de grandeza espiritual, que les impide concebir la idea de un Poder Divino. Al

There comes a moment when an individual who is too honest to take refuge in the old illusion of self-importance is suspended agonizingly between the flat sky and the flat earth, and prayer is no more that a slight gumminess on the roof of the mouth.

Voss could always, if necessary, fail to understand. But wounds will wince, especially in the salt air. He was smiling and screwing up his eyes at the great theatre of light and water. Some pitied him. Some despised him for his funny appearance of a foreigner. None, he realized with a tremor of anger, was conscious of his strength. Mediocre, animal men never do guess at the power of rock or fire, until the last moment before those elements reduce them to - nothing. This, the palest, the most transparent of words, yet comes closest to being complete.