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“The word 'free-lance', I used to think, had a romantic ring; but sadly discovered, when I tried to be one, that its practice has little freedom, and the lance is a sorry weapon to tilt at literary windmills.”
― The Colin MacInnes Omnibus: City of Spades, Absolute Beginners, Mr Love and Justice
― The Colin MacInnes Omnibus: City of Spades, Absolute Beginners, Mr Love and Justice
“You bet I’m a patriot!’ I exclaimed. ‘It’s because I’m a patriot, that I can’t bear our country.”
― Absolute Beginners
― Absolute Beginners
“Now, you can think what you like about the art of jazz – quite frankly, I don’t really care what you think, because jazz is a thing so wonderful that if anybody doesn’t rave about it, all you can feel for them is pity: not that I’m making out I really understand it all – I mean, certain LPs leave me speechless.”
― Absolute Beginners
― Absolute Beginners
“How quickly they pass, the pioneering days! There is 'virgin' (unenriched, undamaged) country where never a white man has set his feet. Then come a scattering of nomads: the explorers, the gold-rushers, the bushrangers, the prospectors. Then the landgrabbers, followed soon by civilized machinery that makes their grab their own; and within two generations, a vast area of fertile wilderness has lost its secret and is parcelled out like the main street of a city.
As this happens, the aboriginals, possessed of ticking clocks and a taste for liquor, withdraw, fascinated and horrified, into the deeper bush. And on their heels there follow restless whites: those who can never settle down, those who believe it's not yet time to wake up from a dream. Surely in a gigantic continent there's always space to find! So they ride on into the interior, away from the creeping railways and the courthouses, till at last they are washed up beyond the mountains on to the shores of the central desert, hemmed in by the tracts of salty sand before them, and the law behind their backs.”
― June in Her Spring
As this happens, the aboriginals, possessed of ticking clocks and a taste for liquor, withdraw, fascinated and horrified, into the deeper bush. And on their heels there follow restless whites: those who can never settle down, those who believe it's not yet time to wake up from a dream. Surely in a gigantic continent there's always space to find! So they ride on into the interior, away from the creeping railways and the courthouses, till at last they are washed up beyond the mountains on to the shores of the central desert, hemmed in by the tracts of salty sand before them, and the law behind their backs.”
― June in Her Spring
“Because jazz music is a thing that, as few things do, makes you feel really at home in the world here, as if it's an okay notion to be born a human animal, or so.”
― Absolute Beginners
― Absolute Beginners
