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Top 25 David Malouf Quotes (2025 Update)

David Malouf Quote: “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.”

1. “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

David Malouf Quote: “All the things we achieve are things we have first of all imagined.”

2. “All the things we achieve are things we have first of all imagined.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “Achilles too staggered a moment. He felt his soul change colour. Blood pooled at his feet, and though he continued to stand upright and triumphant in the sun, his spirit set off on its own downward path and approached the boarders of an unknown region.”

3. “Achilles too staggered a moment. He felt his soul change colour. Blood pooled at his feet, and though he continued to stand upright and triumphant in the sun, his spirit set off on its own downward path and approached the boarders of an unknown region.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “Silence is a form of communication. Speech divides us.”

4. “Silence is a form of communication. Speech divides us.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “We are continuous with all the particles of our physical being, as in our breathing we are continuous with the sky. Between our bodies and the world there is unity and commerce.”

5. “We are continuous with all the particles of our physical being, as in our breathing we are continuous with the sky. Between our bodies and the world there is unity and commerce.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “I knew that the world around you is only uninteresting if you can’t see what is really going on. The place you come from is always the most exotic place you’ll ever encounter because it is the only place where you recognise how many secrets and mysteries there are in people’s lives.”

6. “I knew that the world around you is only uninteresting if you can’t see what is really going on. The place you come from is always the most exotic place you’ll ever encounter because it is the only place where you recognise how many secrets and mysteries there are in people’s lives.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?”

7. “What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “Now that spring is no longer to be recognised in blossoms or in new leaves on trees, I must look for it in myself. I feel the ice of myself cracking. I feel myself loosen and flow again, reflecting the world. That is what spring means.”

8. “Now that spring is no longer to be recognised in blossoms or in new leaves on trees, I must look for it in myself. I feel the ice of myself cracking. I feel myself loosen and flow again, reflecting the world. That is what spring means.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.”

9. “I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “Enemies, like friends, told you who you were.”

10. “Enemies, like friends, told you who you were.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “We’re such contrary creatures.”

11. “We’re such contrary creatures.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “I write not to record what I think but to discover what I think.”

12. “I write not to record what I think but to discover what I think.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “With all those prizes the most interesting thing is getting on to the shortlist, because that tells you who people see as your peers.”

13. “With all those prizes the most interesting thing is getting on to the shortlist, because that tells you who people see as your peers.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “Words his soul danced to.”

14. “Words his soul danced to.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “He had entered the rough world of men, where a man’s acts follow him wherever he goes in the form of story.”

15. “He had entered the rough world of men, where a man’s acts follow him wherever he goes in the form of story.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “It re-enters the world of the Iliad to recount the story of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector, and, in a very different version from the original, Priam’s journey to the Greek camp. But its primary interest is in storytelling itself – why stories are told and why we need to hear them, how stories get changed in the telling – and much of what it has to tell are ‘untold tales’ found only in the margins of earlier writers.”

16. “It re-enters the world of the Iliad to recount the story of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector, and, in a very different version from the original, Priam’s journey to the Greek camp. But its primary interest is in storytelling itself – why stories are told and why we need to hear them, how stories get changed in the telling – and much of what it has to tell are ‘untold tales’ found only in the margins of earlier writers.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world.”

17. “Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “We are mortals, not gods. We die. Death is our nature. Without that fee paid in advance, the world does not come to us. That is the hard bargain life makes with us – with all of us, every one – and the condition we share. And for that reason, if no other, we should have pity for one another’s losses. For the sorrows that must come sooner or later to each one of us, in a world we enter only on mortal terms.”

18. “We are mortals, not gods. We die. Death is our nature. Without that fee paid in advance, the world does not come to us. That is the hard bargain life makes with us – with all of us, every one – and the condition we share. And for that reason, if no other, we should have pity for one another’s losses. For the sorrows that must come sooner or later to each one of us, in a world we enter only on mortal terms.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “So many things were new. Everything changed. The past would not hold and could not be held.”

19. “So many things were new. Everything changed. The past would not hold and could not be held.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “The prospect of going home again scared them. They couldn’t imagine how they could ever settle to it. How they could just walk around the streets and pretend to be normal, look women in the eye again after what they had done and seen, ride on trams, sit at a table with a white cloth, and control their hands and just slowly eat. It was the little things that scared them. The big things you could hide in. It was little ones that gave a man away.”

20. “The prospect of going home again scared them. They couldn’t imagine how they could ever settle to it. How they could just walk around the streets and pretend to be normal, look women in the eye again after what they had done and seen, ride on trams, sit at a table with a white cloth, and control their hands and just slowly eat. It was the little things that scared them. The big things you could hide in. It was little ones that gave a man away.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “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.”

21. “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

David Malouf Quote: “A life wasn’t for anything. It simply was.”

22. “A life wasn’t for anything. It simply was.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.”

23. “Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact.”

24. “The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “Mathematics. It soothed, it allowed you, once you had perceived it, to breathe.”

25. “Mathematics. It soothed, it allowed you, once you had perceived it, to breathe.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “Still the fact remains, he had me hooked. As he had, of course, from the beginning. I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met.”

26. “Still the fact remains, he had me hooked. As he had, of course, from the beginning. I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “The world, for Achilles, reassembled itself around a new centre.”

27. “The world, for Achilles, reassembled itself around a new centre.”

— David Malouf

David Malouf Quote: “This new lot... they too would go down. They were ‘troops’ who were about to be ‘thrown in,’ ‘men’ in some general’s larger plan, ‘re-enforcements ’ and would soon be ‘casualties’. They were also Spud, Snow, Skeeter, Blue, Tommo.”

28. “This new lot... they too would go down. They were ‘troops’ who were about to be ‘thrown in,’ ‘men’ in some general’s larger plan, ‘re-enforcements ’ and would soon be ‘casualties’. They were also Spud, Snow, Skeeter, Blue, Tommo.”

— David Malouf

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