Colleen McCullough Quotes

Age brought wisdom, but it also brought a genuine gratitude for the happiness of sharing life with someone as much liked as loved.

All that appearance business is crap, and I'm not even going to be bothered arguing with you about it.

I escaped the torture of my childhood home by reading. To this day it is still one of my greatest pleasures.

But I'll pin you to the wall on your own weakness, I'll make you sell yourself like any painted whore." Mary Carson to Father Ralph.

Never forget, Caelius, that a great man makes his luck. Luck is there for everyone to seize. Most of us miss our chances; we're blind to our luck. He never misses a chance because he's never blind to the opportunity of the moment.

I can't share your love of God. But I do understand your need to give your life to him. Each of us has within us something that just won't be denied. Something to which we are driven even though it makes us scream aloud to die.

Living's for those of us who failed. Greedy God, gathering in the good ones, leaving the world to the rest of us, to rot.

If you love people, they kill you. If you need people, they kill you. They do I tell you!

In The Touch, the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else I've ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination.

You just hang onto the thought that every dog has its day, even the bitches

Perfection in anything is unbearably dull. Myself, I prefer a touch of imperfection.

loved, and indulged to the full extent of her father

The shock of having to pull herself up in the midst of a spontaneous reaction - I must remember to tell Dane about this, he'll get such a kick out of it - that was what hurt the most. And because it kept on occurring so often, it prolonged the grief.

You still think love can save us. It's more killing than hate. Hate is so clean, so simple. Like being in the ring. With hate, you just keep hitting back. You hit until they stop hitting back. With love... they never stop." ~ (Frank)

We're working-class people, which means we don't get rich or have maids. Be content with what you are and what you have.

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.

Do you realize that you've been married to me for just about half of your entire life?"
Her head came down, her eyes opened wide to stare at him. "Is that all?" she asked. "It seems an eternity".
"Did I say a quiet lion?" Alexander pulled a face. "An eternity with me has turned you into a bitch, my dear".

Duty, the most indecent of all obsessions, was only another name for love.

Lares of the Crossroads

Rain, rain, rain. Like a benediction from some vast inscrutable hand, long withheld, finally given. The blessed, wonderful rain. For rain meant grass, and grass was life.

The Greeks say it's a sin against the gods to love something beyond all reason. And do you remember that they say when someone is loved so, the gods become jealous, and strike the object down in the very fullness of its flower?

I stopped this one about two months before federation and I want the next one to be more political. It will deal with the formation of white Australian policy and things like that.

It's not worth getting upset about, Mrs. Dominic. Down in the city they don't know how the other half lives, and they can afford the luxury of doting on their animals as if they were children. Out here it's different. 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.

Then God's a bigger poofter than Sweet Willie. "You might be right" said Justine. "He certainly isn't too fond of women, anyway. Second-class, that's us, way back in the Upper Circle. Front Stalls and the Mezzanine, strictly male.

I think explicit love scenes are a turn off unless it's the kind you read with one hand.

Give a Greek enough rope and he'll hang everyone else in sight.

That's the purpose of old age ... To give us a breathing space before we die, in which to see why we did what we did.

orgy of sampling Europe's charms, she never went back, and that was strange. In his experience people always

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

I think I'll wear the Chian outfit,' he said to his body servant standing waiting for orders. Many men in Marius's position would have lain back in the bath water and demanded that they be scrubbed, scraped, and massaged by slaves, but Gaius Marius preferred to do his own dirty work, even now. Mind you, at forty-seven he was still a fine figure of a man. Nothing to be ashamed of about his physique! No matter how ostensibly inert his days might be, he got in a fair amount of exercise, worked with the dumbbells and the closhes, swam if he could several times across the Tiber in the reach called the Trigarium, then ran all the way back from the far perimeter of the Campus Martius to his house on the flanks of the Capitoline Arx. His hair was getting a bit thin on top, but he still had enough dark brown curls to brush forward into a respectable coiffure. There. That would have to do. A beauty he had never been, never would be. A good face - even an impressive one - but no rival for Gaius Julius Caesar's!

In early draft it never satisfied me, and that was when it clicked into place and it went so well as a diary.

And gradually his memory slipped a little, as memories do, even those with so much love attached to them; as if there is an unconscious healing process within the mind which mends up in spite of our desperate determination never to forget.

on him at the time of his majority, and was more than enough for his needs. He would live his own life, then, far from Melbourne and parents, carve his own kind of niche. But the imminence

Love and hate are cruel, only liking is kind

Belief doesn't rest on proof or existence...it rests on faith...without faith there is nothing.

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

I am writing a sequel to The Touch because I want to further explore the Chinese question that I have raised. There will be more about that in a sequel.

He hadn't wooed her, but had simply claimed her. A gold mine ready to dig. There should have been a period of quiet dinners together, of flowers rather than diamonds, of kisses given after permission to kiss, of a slow awakening that predisposed her to greater intimacies. But no, not the great Alexander Kinross! He had met her, he had married her the next day, and climbed into her bed after one kiss in the church. There to prove himself an animal in her eyes. One mistake after another, that was the story of his relationship with Elizabeth. And Ruby had always meant more.

sold into an indentured servitude

The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.

He had always been her baby, her lovely little boy; though she had watched him change and grow with proprietary pride, she had done so with an image of laughing baby superimposed on his maturing face.

Twelve thousand miles of it, to the other side of the world. And whether they came home again or not, they would belong neither here, nor there, for they would have lived on two continents and sampled two different ways of life.

father could hope for in a son.To have

Corunda Base Hospital itself continued to function on doctors, nurses, domestic staff, food preparers, and ancillary staff in the same old way, so that the patients lived (or died) in relative ignorance of the drama going on at an executive level. Indeed, it was a rare patient even knew that a hospital had executives.

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.

She told fortunes for a living. It's a wacky book and was great fun to write. It is very much a look at what life was like for women in Australia in the 1960's.

The Labour Party of today has fits of horrors of the very thought of somebody like me might saying that they bought in white Australia. But I believe they did.

Meggie dropped to her knees, scrambling frantically to collect the miniature clothes before more damage was done them, then she began picking among the grass blades where she thought the pearls might have fallen. Her tears were blinding her, the grief in her heart new, for until now she had never owned anything worth grieving for.

Yet there's something ominous about turning sixty-five. Suddenly old age is not a phenomenon which will occur; it has occurred.

There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone's heart.

Once I've got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I'll check my research.

You say you love me, but you have no idea what love is; you're just mouthing words you've memorized because you think they sound good!

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

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.

When we press the thorn to our chest we know, we understand, and still we do it.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

No man sees himself in a mirror as he really is, nor any woman.

But work used to be the lot of every man, and now it is rapidly becoming an aristocratic privilege. Men nowadays are more often paid not to work.

Nothing is given without a disadvantage in it,

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.

I have discovered," he said to Charles Dewy, "that when a man marries, peace of mind and freedom go out of the window."
"Well, old boy," said Charles comfortably, "that's the price we have to pay for having company in our old age and for ensuring that we have heirs to follow us.

Why shouldn't the living cords which lace our being together flick softly against a loved one in the very moment of their unraveling?...Sometimes, all the miles between are as nothing, sometimes, they are narrowed to the little silence between the beats of a heart.

It's no fun to be a bluestocking in a family of jockstraps.

My husband says it is very good that I have very tiny feet, because they're easier to get in my mouth.

His sudden and utterly overwhelming panic was over almost before it began; but not quickly enough. In the midst of his brief yet total terror, the King of Pontus shat himself. It went everywhere, solid faeces mixed with what seemed an incredible amount of more liquid bowel contents, a stinking brown mess all over the gold-encrusted purple cloth of his cushion, trickling down the legs of his throne, running down his own legs into the manes of the golden lions upon the flaps of his boots, pooling and plopping on the deck around his feet when he jumped up. And there was nowhere to go! He could not conceal it from the amazed eyes of his attendants and officers, he could not conceal it from the sailors below amidships who had looked up instinctively to make sure their King was safe.

The bird with the thorn in its breast, it follows an immutable law; it is driven by it knows not what to impale itself, and die singing. At the very instant the thorn enters there is no awareness in it of the dying to come; it simply sings and sings until there is not the life left to utter another note. But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it.

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.

He owe his wife a debt he couldn't hope to pay with any coin save one: open the cage and let the bird fly.

For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain.

Suddenly the thought that the end of her life was imminent shocked him; it was one thing to pity someone he didn't know, quite another to face the same dilemma with someone he knew intimately. That was the trouble with beds. They turned strangers into intimates more quickly than ten years of polite teas in parlours.

went to the cross eight months before His