Dorothea Mackellar quotes

“I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, Of rugged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror - the wide brown land for me!”
-- Dorothea Mackellar

Source : 1905 'Core of My Heart', first published in the London Spectator. Collected as 'My Country' in The Closed Door, and Other Verses (1911).

#Country Quotes #Rain Quotes #Jewels Quotes

“A country scratching a lazy irritation at sagging doorjambs and late trains, whose greatest attribute is a collective, smelly tolerance, where a chap will put up with almost everything, which means he won't care about anything enough to get out of a chair.A country of public insouciance and private, grubby guilt, where you can believe anything as long as you don't believe it too fervently. A country where the highest aspiration is for a quiet life.”

“American statesmen might like some Europeans more than others and even detect quaint resemblances to their own outlook; but they no more committed themselves to a particular group or country than a nineteenth-century missionary committed himself to the African tribe in which he happened to find himself.”

“Even if my country remains in war with yours. . .remember. . . i am not your enemy.”

“Tut, Tut, looks like rain”

“The rain is plentious but, by God's decree, Only a third is meant for you and me; Two-thirds are taken by the growing things Or vanish Heavenward on vapour's wings: Nor does it mathematically fall With social equity on one and all. The population's habit is to grow In every region where the water's low: Nature is blamed for failings that are Man's, And well-run rivers have to change their plans.”

“Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature. It becomes a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity. Ice congeals in the stomach. Frost spiderwebs in the lungs. The heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a colder artery.”

“How brave a ladybug must be! Each drop of rain is big as she. Can you imagine what you'd do, If raindrops fell as big as you?”

“I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews. I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words turned into mad horses into fresh children into clots into curfew into vestiges of temples into precious stones remote enough to discourage miners. Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.”

“The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.”

“Each of your breaths is a priceless jewel, since each of them is irreplaceable and once gone, can never be retrieved.”