Top 60 John Marsden Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.”

— John Marsden

2. “We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.”

— John Marsden

3. “Never cry over anything that can’t cry over you.”

— John Marsden

4. “The biggest risk, is to take no risks.”

— John Marsden

5. “Live as though you’ll die tomorrow, but farm as though you’ll live forever.”

— John Marsden

6. “Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission.”

— John Marsden

7. “Too much thinking, not enough feeling.”

— John Marsden

8. “The only true test of friendship is the time your friend spends on you.”

— John Marsden

9. “What’s the Future? It’s a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren’t the lines we wanted.”

— John Marsden

10. “Some people wake up drowsy. Some people wake up energized. I wake up dead.”

— John Marsden

11. “There are some things that once you’ve lost, you never get back. Innocence is one. Love is another. I guess childhood is a third.”

— John Marsden

12. “I live in the light, But carry my dark with me.”

— John Marsden

13. “We’re all so curiously alone, but it’s important to keep making signals through the glass.”

— John Marsden

14. “It’s good to keep changing your mind. It shows you’re thinking. I’ll only stop changing my mind when I’m dead. And maybe not even then.”

— John Marsden

15. “Blame it on Peer Pressure.”

— John Marsden

16. “There’s no room for anything else. You forget that you’re tired or cold or hungry. You forget that banged-up knee and your aching tooth. You forget the past, and you forget that there’s such a thing as a future.”

— John Marsden

17. “Life’s harder, the deeper you feel things.”

— John Marsden

18. “At that age you think boys have as much personality as coat hangers and, you don’t notice their looks. Then you grow up.”

— John Marsden

19. “We’ll never feel safe again, and so it’s bye-bye innocence. It’s been nice knowing you, but you’re gone now.”

— John Marsden

20. “In the midst of death we are in life.”

— John Marsden

21. “I felt that my life was permanently damaged, that I could never be normal again, that the rest of my life would just be a shell.”

— John Marsden

22. “We believed we were safe. That was the big fantasy.”

— John Marsden

23. “Silence, always my fortress, sometimes my prison.”

— John Marsden

24. “I’m a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that’s me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I’d die; I don’t know what of, I just knew I’d die.”

— John Marsden

25. “Well, I’ve learnt this much: it doesn’t matter what it costs, it’s worth paying the price. You can’t live cheap and you can’t live for nothing. Pay the price and be proud you’ve paid it, that’s what I reckon.”

— John Marsden

26. “It’s terribly, terribly important recording what we’ve done, in words, on paper, it’s got to be our way of telling ourselves that we mean something, that we matter. That the things we’ve done have made a difference. I don’t know how big a difference, but a difference. Writing it down means we might be remembered. And by God that matters to us. None of us wants to end up as a pile of dead white bones, unnoticed, unknown, and worst of all, with no one knowing or appreciating the risks we’ve run.”

— John Marsden

27. “Oh, Homer! You don’t have to play dumb anymore! You’re not at school now.”

— John Marsden

28. “I can’t describe the feeling when I go down – it’s down down down and there’s never going to be an up again. And whatever was good isn’t good any more; white becomes grey, music becomes dictionaries, honey becomes beer and the sky a curdled lemon. There’s no caramel anymore.”

— John Marsden

29. “I knew I was breaking about a dozen laws but I guess I had different attitudes to stuff like that since the war. Laws were for the stupid the immature the irresponsible. The inflexible and the narrow-minded. The prejudiced. The obsessive. The lazy and careless and selfish and spoilt. The violent.”

— John Marsden

30. “Sometimes I think I’d rather be frightened than bored. At least when you’re frightened you know you’re alive.”

— John Marsden

31. “He carried Hell with him, as we all did, like a little load on our backs that we hardly noticed most of the time, or like a huge great hump of suffering that bent us over with its weight.”

— John Marsden

32. “Silence, sometimes my fortress, always my prison.”

— John Marsden

33. “Human laws, moral laws, religious laws, they seemed artificial and basic, almost childlike.”

— John Marsden

34. “Don’t treat people as you think they are, treat them as you think they are capable of becoming.”

— John Marsden

35. “Just because school’s boring so much of the time, that doesn’t mean kids don’t want to learn.”

— John Marsden

36. “Let no stranger intrude here, no invader trespass. This was ours, and this we would defend.”

— John Marsden

37. “I’ve heard enough about what you want to do; now tell me what needs doing.”

— John Marsden

38. “We’d thought that we were among the first humans to invade this basin, but humans had invaded everything, everywhere. They didn’t have to walk into a place to invade it.”

— John Marsden

39. “Light is important to us humans. It influences our moods, our perceptions, our energy levels. A face glimpsed among trees, dappled by the shadows and the green-tinged light reflected from the forest, will seem quite different to the same face seen on a beach in hard, dry, sunlight, or in a darkening room at twilight, with the shadows of a venetian blind striped across it like a convict’s uniform.”

— John Marsden

40. “I didn’t confess how wrecked I was. Let them keep thinking I was Superwoman if they wanted. I knew the truth.”

— John Marsden

41. “My survival was up to me. I had nothing and I had no one. What I did have, I told myself, was my mind, my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. These were important and powerful things.”

— John Marsden

42. “Writing is not a job or activity. Nor do I sit at a desk writing for inspiration to strike. Writing is like a different kind of existence. In my life, for some of the time, I am in an alternative world, which I enter through day-dreaming or imagination. That world seems as real to me as the more tangible one of relationships and work, cars and taxes. I don’t know that they’re much different from each other.”

— John Marsden

43. “Parenting means teaching children to get their own Weet-Bix.”

— John Marsden

44. “Life’s harder, the deeper you feel things, was all I could think as I put the books away. Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they’re like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they’re a curse.”

— John Marsden

45. “Night started to fall, then it fell, till it was lying all over the ground.”

— John Marsden

46. “Some people wake up fast. Some people wake up slow. I wake up dead.”

— John Marsden

47. “I wonder if they realize how much I notice about them They probably haven’t a clue because I never look at them or show the slightest interest. But I’m very aware of everything. I remember seeing an old film once where a father says to his son: “Son when your mouth’s open you’re not learning anything.” If that’s true then I’m well on the way to becoming the world’s wisest woman.”

— John Marsden

48. “I mean that the more confident people are about their beliefs, the more likely they are to be wrong. It’s the ones who are so certain, so black and white, the ones who never consider that they could be wrong or that anyone else could be right, they’re the ones who scare me. When you’re not confident at least you keep checking what you do and asking yourself if you’re on the right track.”

— John Marsden

49. “There’s life in his face again. It occurs to me that this is the best thing I could have done, it’s actually a great way to leave, because it’s giving Gavin the message that we haven’t been defeated, we are up for it, we’re young, we’re in control of our lives again, we can charge into the future with confidence. When we round the corner of the driveway I take his hand and we run down to the gate together.”

— John Marsden

50. “When you’re scared you can either give in to the panic and let your mind fall apart, or you can take charge of your mind and think brave.”

— John Marsden