Colleen McCullough

Author

1937-06-01

Quotes by Colleen McCullough

• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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