Miles Franklin Quotes

Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings.

It's a sign of your own worth sometimes if you are hated by the right people.

there is a law of retribution in all things, direct or indirect, visible or invisible.

To grow up in intimate association with nature - animal and vegetable - is an irreplaceable form of wealth and culture.

Heed the spark or you may dread the fire.

It is the highest form of culture and craftmanship in art to use local materials. That way you stand a chance of adding to culture. The other way you are in danger of merely imitating it.

Girls! Girls! Those of you who have hearts, and therefore a wish for happiness, homes and husbands by and by, never develop a reputation for being clever.

There are only two kinds of parents. Those who think their offspring can do nothing wrong, and those who think they can do nothing right.

Every now and again it would be considered wholesome for me to be more with people of my own age. Demotion to such company was a sapless exile. Their inanity was insufferable.

In the career of a prodigy there invariably comes a time when it is compelled to relinquish being very clever for a child, and has to enter the business of life in competition with adults.

I early became conscious that men breathe more audibly than women. Sit in a room in silence with men and women, and you can always hear the men breathing.

Grandpa ... was ever ready to cheer and help me, ever sure that I was a remarkable specimen. He was a dear old man who asked little from life and got less.

... we each have our fleeting hour.

... no problem except old age ever vanquished my mother.

All is egotism. The only people whose mainspring is not egotism are the dead and perhaps idiots.

Ah, the bitter, hopeless heart-hunger of godlessness none but an atheist can understand!

Only a very small percentage can regard conditions from any but a selfish point of view or conceive of any but their own shoe-pinch.

Cowards always drag in the Bible to back theirselves up far more than proper people does.

What I absorbed from autobiographies was not how to be great so much as the littleness of the great.

the way to wean any one from a desire is not by condemnation of it.

It is a wise provision that youth cannot see what it owes the previous generation. This is a chicken that comes back to roost in heavier years.

It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand for.

I don't believe there is a God", I said fiercely, "and if there is, He's not the merciful being He's always depicted, or He wouldn't be always torturing me for His own amusement.