An Imaginary Life Quotes

“What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that which drives us on to what we must finally become… This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six. I am there.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“So these things happen, deep in our lives. We do not speak of them. We hide them even from ourselves, but they do not leave us.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“We are free at last to believe in ourselves.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“I now have of a life that stretches beyond the limits of measurable time.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“Scarlet! It is the first colour I have seen in months. Or so it seems. Scarlet. A little wild poppy, of a red so sudden it made my blood stop. I kept saying the word over and over to myself, scarlet, as if the word, like the colour, had escaped me till now, and just saying it would keep the little windblown flower in sight.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“Always to be pushing out like this, beyond what I know cannot be the limits - what else should a man's life be?”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“Or does not knowing make him free?”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“Everything I ever valued before this was valued only because it was useless, because time spent upon it was not demanded but freely given, because to play is to be free. Free is not a word that exists here, I think, in their language. Nothing here is free of its own nature, its own law.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“I have heard no word of my own language; I am rendered dumb.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“It is summer. It is Spring. I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six.
I am there.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“And if other old men must be willing, at the end, to push up off their deathbed and adventure out into the unknown, how much more willing must that man be whose whole life has been just such a daily exercise of adventuring, even in the stillness of his own garden? I mean, the poet.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“I scoffed at such old fashioned notions as duty, patriotism, the military virtues. And here I was, aged fifty, standing on guard at the very edge of the known world. To protect what? A hundred or so mud and wattle huts, three hundred savage strangers who do not even speak my tongue. And, of course, my own skin.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“Winter here is a time of slow-smouldering resentments, of suspicion, of fantasies that grow as the days move deeper into the year's darkness and the cold drives us closer together and yet further apart.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“Scarlet!
It is the first color I have seen in months. Or so it seems. Scarlet. A little wild poppy, of a red so sudden it made my blood stop. I kept saying the word over and over to myself, scarlet, as if the word, like the color, had escaped me till now, and just saying it would keep the little windblown flower in sight. Poppy. The magic of saying the word made my skin prickle, the saying almost a greater miracle than the seeing. I was drunk with joy. I danced. I shouted. Imagine the astonishment of my friends at Rome to see our cynical metropolitan poet, who barely knows a flower or a tree, dancing about in broken sandals on the earth, which is baked hard and cracked in some places, and in others puddled with foul-smelling mud- to see him dancing and singing to himself in celebration of this bloom. Poppy, scarlet poppy, flower of my far-off childhood and the cornfields round our farm at Sulmo, I have brought you into being again, I have raised you out of my earliest memories, out of my blood, to set you blowing in the wind. Scarlet. Magic word on the tongue to flash again on the eye. Scarlet.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life