Peter Carey > Quotes

“To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.”
― Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

“You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.”
― Peter Carey, Oscar And Lucinda

“But now she could not bear the way she sounded. She was not a person anyone could love.

...

And thus fled to her room. There she wept, bitterly, an ugly sound punctuated by great gulps. She could not stop herself. She could hear his footsteps in the passage outside. He walked up and down, up and down.

'Come in,' she prayed. 'Oh dearest, do come in.'

But he did not come in. He would not come in. This was the man she had practically contracted to give away her fortune to. He offered to marry her as a favour and then he would not even come into her room.

Later, she could smell him make himself a sweet pancake for his lunch. She thought this a childish thing to eat, and selfish, too. If he were a gentleman he would now come to her room and save her from the prison her foolishness had made for her. He did not come. She heard him pacing in his room.”
― Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

“People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else”
― Peter Carey, Collected Stories

“(From the story The Last Days of a Famous Mime)
He said nothing. He was mildly annoyed at her presumption: that he had not thought this many, many times before.
With perfect misunderstanding she interpreted his passivity as disdain.
Wishing to hurt him, she slapped his face.
Wishing to hurt her, he smiled brilliantly.”
― Peter Carey, Collected Stories

“Swimming always cleans your soul”
― Peter Carey, His Illegal Self

“I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.”
― Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America

“If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.”
― Peter Carey

“I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare.”
― Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America

“She held out her hand, like a man. He hesitated, then took the hand and shook it. It was very warm. You could not help but be aware of the wild passage of blood on the other side of its wall, veins, capillaries, sweat glands, tiny factories in the throes of complicated manufacture. [He] looked at the eyes and, knowing how eyes worked, was astonished, not for the first time, at the infinite complexity of Creation, wondering how this thing, this instrument for seeing, could transmit so clearly its entreaty while at the same time—-Look, I am only an eye—-denying that it was doing anything of the sort.”
― Peter Carey, Oscar And Lucinda

“He was tender with her. He wiped her eyelids with his handkerchief, not noticing how soiled it was. It was stained with ink, crumpled, stuck together. Her lids were large and tender and the handkerchief was stiff, not nearly soft enough. He moistened a corner in his mouth. He was painfully aware of the private softness of her skin, of how the eyes trembled beneath their coverings. He dried the tears with an affection, a particularity, that had never been exercised before. It was a demonstration of 'nature.' He was a birth-wet foal rising to his feet.”
― Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

“Would you rather have the lords and nobles back? What is Democracy for? Not so we can rob each other. Or cheat.' I said cheat and felt the teeth in it, the cleat, the cut, the eat.”
― Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America

“7. Some Theories that Arose at the Time
1. The world is merely a dream dreamt by god who is waking after a long sleep. When he is properly awake the world will disappear completely. When the world disappears we will disappear with it and be happy.
2. The world has become sensitive to light. In the same way that prolonged use of, say, penicillin can suddenly result in a dangerous allergy, prolonged exposure of the world to the sun has made it sensitive to light.
The advocates of this theory could be seen bustling through the city crowds in their long, hooded black robes.
3. The fact that the world is disappearing has been caused by the sloppy work of the Cartographers and the census takers. Those who filled out their census forms incorrectly would lose those items they had neglected to describe. People overlooked in the census by impatient officials would also disappear. A strong pressure group demanded that a new census be taken quickly before matters got worse.
- From the story "Do You Love Me?”
― Peter Carey, Collected Stories

“Man is born free and is everywhere in chains”
― Peter Carey

“after we ate we was silent on our blankets looking out across the mighty Great Divide I never seen this country before it were like a fairy story landscape the clear and windy skies was filled with diamonds the jagged black outlines of the ranges were a panorama.

You're going to ride a horse across all that.

I know.

He laughed and he were right I knew nothing of what lay ahead.

See that there he pointed. That is called the Crosscut Saw and that one is Mount Speculation and yonder is Mount Buggery and that other is Mount Despair did you know that?

No Harry.

You will and you'll be sorry.”
― Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang

“Lucinda might sneak from her own house at midnight to place a wager somewhere else, but she dared not touch the pack that lay in her own sideboard. She knew how passionate he had become about his 'weakness.' She dared not even ask him how it was he had reversed his opinions on the matter. But, oh, how she yearned to discuss it with him, how much she wished to deal a hand on a grey wool blanket. There would be no headaches then, only this sweet consummation of their comradeship.

But she said not a word. And although she might have her 'dainty' shoes tossed to the floor, have her bare toes quite visible through her stockings, have a draught of sherry in her hand, in short appear quite radical, she was too timid, she thought, too much a mouse, to reveal her gambler's heart to him. She did not like this mouselike quality. As usual, she found herself too careful, too held in.

Once she said: 'I wish I had ten sisters and a big kitchen to laugh in.'

Her lodger frowned and dusted his knees.

She thought: He is as near to a sister as I am likely to get, but he does not understand.

She would have had a woman friend so they could brush each other's hair, and just, please God, put aside this great clanking suit of ugly armor.

She kept her glass dreams from him, even whilst she appeared to talk about them. He was an admiring listener, but she only showed him the opaque skin of her dreams--window glass, the price of transporting it, the difficulties with builders who would not pay their bills inside six months. He imagined this was her business, and of course it was, but all the things she spoke of were a fog across its landscape which was filled with such soaring mountains she would be embarrassed to lay claim to them. Her true ambition, the one she would not confess to him, was to build something Extraordinary and Fine from glass and cast iron. A conservatory, but not a conservatory. Glass laced with steel, spun like a spider web--the idea danced around the periphery of her vision, never long enough to be clear. When she attempted to make a sketch, it became diminished, wooden, inelegant. Sometimes, in her dreams, she felt she had discovered its form, but if she had, it was like an improperly fixed photograph which fades when exposed to daylight. She was wise enough, or foolish enough, to believe this did not matter, that the form would present itself to her in the end.”
― Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

“About her husband, i did actually enquire, but she held her private life so fucking tightly, like a tourist clutching a handbag on the A train,..”
― Peter Carey, Theft: A Love Story

“If you know the country he said then you will be a wild colonial boy forever”
― Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang

“His hair was a curling mess and he showed the proper desregard for sartorial elegance which Harry had always seen as a sign of reliability in a person. Neat men always struck him as desperate and ambitious.”
― Peter Carey, Bliss

“Your American, you wouldn't know if you were up yourself.”
― Peter Carey, His Illegal Self

“Theophilus Hopkins was a moderately famous man. You can look him up in the 1860 Britannica. There are three full columns about his corals and his corallines, his anemones and starfish. It does not have anything very useful about the man. It does not tell you what he was like. You can read it three times over and never guess that he had any particular attitude to Christmas pudding.”
― Peter Carey, Oscar And Lucinda

“The seamen had whitewashed the smoky ceilings of the ward, and that dear homely smell carried the vividness of thatch and lumpy walls and stew given from the goodness of a stranger's heart. But that was all there was of comfort, and the salt air had turned from cold to warm in the passing of a life, an afternoon.”
― Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America

“I did not know that history is like a blood stain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we pint over it.”
― Peter Carey

“Our prime minister could embrace and forgive the people who killed our beloved sons and fathers, and so he should, but he could not, would not, apologise to the Aboriginal people for 200 years of murder and abuse. The battle against the Turks, he said in Gallipoli, was our history, our tradition. The war against the Aboriginals, he had already said at home, had happened long ago. The battle had made us; the war that won the continent was best forgotten”
― Peter Carey