Explore Quotes by John Marsden

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am.

Life's harder, the deeper you feel things, was all I could think as I put the books away. Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.

I'm a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that's me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I'd die; I don't know what of, I just knew I'd die.

My survival was up to me. I had nothing and I had no one. What I did have, I told myself, was my mind, my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. These were important and powerful things.

The only true test of friendship is the time your friend spends on you.

My pen.’ Funny, I wrote that without noticing. ‘The torch’, ‘the paper’, but ‘my pen’. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It’s about the most important thing I own.

I feel like I'm dropping such a long way down again." "I seem to be dropping into a cold dark wet place, where no one's been before and noone can every follow. There's no future there; just a past that sometimes fools you into thinking it's the future. It's the most alone place you can ever be and, when you go there, you not only cease to exist in real life, you also cease to exist in their consciousness and in their memories.

What's the Future? It's a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren't the lines we wanted.

Never cry over something that can't cry over you.

Writing is not a job or activity. Nor do I sit at a desk writing for inspiration to strike. Writing is like a different kind of existence. In my life, for some of the time, I am in an alternative world, which I enter through day-dreaming or imagination. That world seems as real to me as the more tangible one of relationships and work, cars and taxes. I don't know that they're much different from each other.

We had enough years in front of us to be serious and grown-up and respectable. Why rush it? But on the other hand we always complained when teachers and other adults treated us as kids. In fact there was nothing that annoyed me more. So it was a frustrating situation. What we needed was a two-sided badge that said 'Mature' on one side and 'Childish' on the other. Then at any moment we could turn it to whatever side we felt like being and the adults could treat us accordingly.

There are some things that once you've lost, you never get back. Innocence is one. Love is another. I guess childhood is a third.

Blame it on Peer Pressure.

Oh, Homer! You don't have to play dumb anymore! You're not at school now.

The dreams now were simply of staying alive.

I didn't confess how wrecked I was. Let them keep thinking I was Superwoman if they wanted. I knew the truth.

There's no room for anything else. You forget that you're tired or cold or hungry. You forget that banged-up knee and your aching tooth. You forget the past, and you forget that there's such a thing as a future.

Nothing reaches inside you and grabs you by the guts the way fear does.

Sometimes I got worried that my memory was falling apart.

Sometimes I think I'd rather be frightened than bored. At least when you're frightened you know you're alive.

All these words, words like 'evil' and 'vicious', they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.