Top 90 Colleen McCullough Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I have an editor in my head, that’s why I can’t read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.”

— Colleen McCullough

52. “Later on after the war was over the women were to find this constantly; the men who had actually been in the thick of battle never opened their mouths about it, refused to join the ex-soldiers’ clubs and leagues, wanted nothing to do with institutions perpetuating the memory of war.”

— Colleen McCullough

53. “Love and hate are cruel, only liking is kind.”

— Colleen McCullough

54. “Why is it, Caesar, that there’s always a man like Lucius Metellus?” “If there were not, Antonius, this world might work better. Though if this world worked better, there’d be no place in it for men like me,” said Caesar.”

— Colleen McCullough

55. “I want to know what they look like, their height, and colouring, physique and speech pattens.”

— Colleen McCullough

56. “Great literature was never intended to be either facsimile or echo of real life; it was meant to shut out real life for a while, to free the harried mind from mundane considerations, so that the mind could holiday amid glorious language and vivid word-pictures and inspiring or alluring ideas.”

— Colleen McCullough

57. “I’ll aways be wondering how you are, what you’re doing, if you’re all right, if there’s anything I could do to help you. I’ll even have to wonder if you’re still alive, won’t I?”

— Colleen McCullough

58. “The world achieved its ultimate contraction, turned in upon itself, and totally disappeared.”

— Colleen McCullough

59. “You’re lucky to have escaped this weary life so soon. Perhaps that’s what hell is, a long term in earth-bound bondage. Perhaps we suffer our hell’s in living...”

— Colleen McCullough

60. “I do not require an apology from you for any of the rest of us, for you have lost our love and respect, and that renders apologies valueless.”

— Colleen McCullough

61. “We all have contempt for whatever there’s too many of. Out here it’s sheep, but in the city it’s people.”

— Colleen McCullough

62. “Something in her little soul was old enough and woman enough to feel the irresistible, stinging joy of being needed; she sat rocking his head back and forth, until his grief expended itself in emptiness.”

— Colleen McCullough

63. “Her tears were blinding her, the grief in her heart new, for until now she had never owned anything worth grieving for.”

— Colleen McCullough

64. “Avoid the plot like the plague; build the characters, then let them rip.”

— Colleen McCullough

65. “All of this was a part of this. The beauty of God and the ugliness of Man. What place could Man have in such a gorgeous universe?”

— Colleen McCullough

66. “The lioness in Rome is quiet. I will not wake her to seek more money.”

— Colleen McCullough

67. “He was, he admitted, a man who liked to have his cake and eat it too.”

— Colleen McCullough

68. “A woman can live without it quite well for years at a stretch, but it was nice, when it was the one man.”

— Colleen McCullough

69. “I suppose daughters are never as patient with their mothers as sons are.”

— Colleen McCullough

70. “What could death be for him but the entrance into everlasting life? For the rest of us, the passage is not so easy.”

— Colleen McCullough

71. “Aurelia herself had no charm at all and despised those who had it, for she had seen how easily they got what they wanted, and how little they valued it once they had it. Charm was the mark of a lightweight, not a leader of men.”

— Colleen McCullough

72. “No one ever dreamed that she loathed the willow pattern tea set, the blue table and chairs, and Agnes’s blue dress.”

— Colleen McCullough

73. “Don’t worry about my life. I can look after it. When I let it go, it will be because I have no further use for it.”

— Colleen McCullough

74. “What can I do when there is no courage in me, Father? Where does courage come from? Why did I not receive my share?”

— Colleen McCullough

75. “The Julian ancestry was so stellar, so august, that opportunities to fill the family coffers had passed.”

— Colleen McCullough

76. “That was what happened when youthful confessions were punished without mercy, when the confessions were not seen as a wish to tell the truth, and therefore were not deemed praiseworthy. So she had learned not to confess; instead, she had learned to keep secrets so well that she hardly knew even her own motives.”

— Colleen McCullough

77. “Dr. Murray made it clear to me before I left that a woman who enhoys the Act is as loose as a harlot. God gives pleasure in it only to husbands. Women are the source of evil and temptation, therefore women are to blame when men fall into fleshly error. It was Eve who seduced Adam, Eve who entered into league with the serpent, who was the Devil in disguise. So the only pleasure women are allowed is in their children.”

— Colleen McCullough

78. “Instincts are significant, I agree with you. They’re like beacons: they light up whole fields of hidden facts, often long before logic can.”

— Colleen McCullough

79. “The Julius Caesars are directly descended from the goddess Venus through her grandson Iulus, son of her son Aeneas.”

— Colleen McCullough

80. “Wine, wine, wine! Nectar of the gods, balm for the sore heart, glue for the shredded spirit! How did I ever exist without it?” He laughed. “I don’t care if I never see another horn of beer or tankard of mead in all the rest of my life! Wine is civilized. No belches, no farts, no distended belly – on beer, a man becomes a walking cistern.”

— Colleen McCullough

81. “No one grovels to me, it demeans me as much as it does the groveler!”

— Colleen McCullough

82. “We are not here together just to make children, Elizabeth. What we’re going to do is sanctified by marriage. It’s an act of love – of love. Not merely of the flesh, but of the mind and even the soul. There’s nothing about it you shouldn’t welcome.”

— Colleen McCullough

83. “Tim, as you go on through the years you’ll find that life is made up of meetings, knowings, and partings. Sometimes we love the people we meet, sometimes we don’t like the people we meet, but knowing them is the most important thing about living, it’s what keeps us human beings.”

— Colleen McCullough

84. “Meggie watched her regarding her grandmother with an affection she never seemed to extend to her mother.”

— Colleen McCullough

85. “There are no spoils in civil wars.”

— Colleen McCullough

86. “And nothing pleased a man more than being told he was the best ever. Luke never dreamed how many men aside from himself had been fooled with that one.”

— Colleen McCullough

87. “The law should not be a huge and weighty slab which falls upon a man and squashes him into a uniform shape, for men are not uniform. The law should be a gentle sheet which falls upon a man and shows his unique shape beneath its blanketing sameness.”

— Colleen McCullough

88. “Don’t you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.’ ‘That’s what I don’t understand. The pain.’ He glanced down at her hand, so gently on his arm, hurting him so unbearably. ‘Why the pain, Meggie?’ ‘Ask God, Ralph,’ said Meggie. ‘He’s the authority on pain, isn’t He? He made us what we are, He made the whole world. Therefore He made the pain, too.”

— Colleen McCullough

89. “True democracy is a Greek philosophic unattainable.”

— Colleen McCullough

90. “Autocracy is insidious.”

— Colleen McCullough

91. “Caesar’s kindnesses are conscious, done for Caesar’s benefit, and Caesar no longer sees the world as a place wherein magical things can occur. Because they can’t. Men and women ruin it with their impulses, desires, thoughtlessness, lack of intelligence and cupidity.”

— Colleen McCullough

92. “But when the bigotry and intolerance stemmed from persons as exalted as state premiers, it simply indicated just how widespread these retarding sentiments were, and how indifferent public men were to uniting rather than dividing people.”

— Colleen McCullough

93. “You’ll never see man, woman or child in need of help go ignored out here, yet in the city those same people who dote on their pets will completely ignore a cry of help from a human being.”

— Colleen McCullough

94. “There is something terribly reassuring about being in politics to enrich oneself. It’s normal. It’s human. It’s forgivable. It’s understandable. The ones to watch are the ones who are in politics to change the world. They do the real damage, the power-men and the altruists. It isn’t healthy to think about other people ahead of oneself. Other people are not as deserving. Did I tell you I was a Skeptic?”

— Colleen McCullough

95. “To love your children is far more important than liking them.”

— Colleen McCullough

96. “They didn’t like company in grief; they preferred to be alone with their pain.”

— Colleen McCullough

97. “What you do is far more significant than why you do it – that’s a fact of life! Why you do a thing is solely balm for the self, why you do a thing cannot affect its outcome. The what is all that matters.”

— Colleen McCullough

98. “Preconceptions are almost always fatal to your chances.”

— Colleen McCullough

99. “There is something terribly reassuring about being in politics to enrich oneself. It’s normal. It’s human. It’s forgivable. It’s understandable. The ones to watch are the ones who are in politics to change the world. They do the real damage, the power-men and the altruists.”

— Colleen McCullough