Patrick White Quotes

• Above all I was determined to prove that the Australian novel is not necessarily the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Uncategorized

• In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions…and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves. It was the exaltation of the ‘average’ that made me panic most.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Uncategorized

• There is nothing like a rain of bombs to start one trying to assess one’s own achievement.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Perhaps true knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Uncategorized

• So that in the end there were the trees. The boy walking through them with his head drooping as he increased in stature. Putting out shoots of green thought. So that, in the end, there was no end.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Uncategorized

• She would imprison the child in her house by the force of love.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Uncategorized

• If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Truth

• When I was rising eighteen I persuaded my parents to let me return to Australia and at least see whether I could adapt myself to life on the land before going up to Cambridge.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Myself, Parents And Parenting

• Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Novel

• Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Effort

  Tags in Poetry

• My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Marriage

• In spite of holidays when I was free to visit London theatres and explore the countryside, I spent four very miserable years as a colonial at an English school.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in London

• In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King’s, especially the discovery of French and German literature.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Discovery

• I think it is impossible to explain faith. It is like trying to explain air, which one cannot do by dividing it into its component parts and labeling them scientifically. It must be breathed to be understood.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Faith, Impossible

• I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Success

  Tags in Lifetime

• I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle’s, on the dining table.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Novel

• I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writers And Writing, Novel

• Even if a university should turn out to be another version of a school, I had decided I could lose myself afterwards as an anonymous particle of the London I already loved.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Myself, University

• As a result of the asthma I was sent to school in the country, and only visited Sydney for brief, violently asthmatic sojourns on my way to a house we owned in the Blue Mountains.

  Patrick White

  Topics in Belief, Country

Patrick White (20)

Birth:	28th May, 1912
Death:	30th September, 1990
Nationality:	Australian
Profession:	Novelist, Playwriter, Screenwriter, Writer

About

Patrick White was an English-born Australian writer who is widely regarded as one of the most important English-language novelists of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, he published 12 novels, three short-story collections and eight plays. White's fiction employs humour, florid prose, shifting narrative vantage points and a stream of consciousness technique. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Australian to have been awarded the prize.

Related Authors

• Gene Kerrigan
• Jamie Ford
• William Gaddis
• Martin Cruz Smith
• Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
• Helen Humphreys
• Evelyn Underhill
• Marina Warner
• Xavier Herbert
• Spider Robinson

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 17th November

Births

• 1866 - Voltairine De Cleyre
• 1978 - Rachel McAdams
• 1964 - Susan Rice
• 1906 - Soichiro Honda
• 1937 - Peter Edward Cook

Deaths

• 1983 - Raymond Aron
• 2002 - Abba Eban
• 2003 - Don Gibson
• 1995 - Marguerite Young
• 1988 - Sheilah Graham