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

But here we call it Spring, when a young man’s fancy turns, fitfully, lightly, to idling in the sun, to touching in the dark. And the old man's? To worms in their garden box; stepping aside moment in a poem that will remember, fitfully, who made it and the discordant stammer, and change of heart and catch of breath it sprang from. A bending down lightly to touch the earth.

— David Malouf

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

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

Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is perfect fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.

— David Malouf

So long as we are driven by the need to make up for our needs; by the restless sense that we are not yet fully assured of our place in the world and our hold on its swarming phenomena; so long as there is more to be discovered and made, more to grasp for and make real, we must go on inventing ourselves.

— David Malouf

So these things happen, deep in our lives. We do not speak of them. We hide them even from ourselves, but they do not leave us.

— David Malouf

The planet, saved for another day, stokes units slow-burning gases and toxic dust, gold rift and scarlet gash that take our breath away; a world at its interminable show of holy dying. And we go with it, the old gatherer and hunter. To its gaudy-day, though the contributions small, adding our Handel of warm clay.

— David Malouf

There is more to darkness than nightfall.

— David Malouf

What drew him back was something altogether more personal, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing on the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone that he knew would never appear. He had long understood that one of his selves, the earliest and most vulnerable, had never left this place, and this original and clearest view of things could be recovered only through what had first come to him in the glow of its ordinary light and weather...it was the light they appeared in that was the point, and that at least had not changed.

— David Malouf