Miles Franklin famous quotes

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

#Relationship #Fundamentals #Needs

Our greatest heart-treasure is a knowledge that there is in creation an individual to whom our existence is necessary - some one who is part of our life as we are part of theirs, some one in whose life we feel assured our death would leave a gap for a day or two.
-- Miles Franklin

#Heart #Two #Treasure

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

#People #Sometimes #Hated

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

#Law #Invisible #Indirect

If the souls of lives were voiced in music, there are some that none but a great organ could express, others the clash of a full orchestra, a few to which nought but the refined and exquisite sadness of a violin could do justice. Many might be likened unto common pianos, jangling and out of tune, and some to the feeble piping of a penny whistle, and mine could be told with a couple of nails in a rusty tin-pot.
-- Miles Franklin

#Couple #Sadness #Piano

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.
-- Miles Franklin

#Cheer #Men #Grandpa

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

Civilization, stretching up to recognize that every child is a portion of State wealth, may presently make some movement to recognize maternity as a business or office needing time and strength, not as a mere passing detail thrown in among mountains of other slavery.
-- Miles Franklin

#Children #Civilization #Office

My mother is a good woman - a very good woman - and I am, I think, not quite all criminality, but we do not pull together. I am a piece of machinery which, not understanding, my mother winds up the wrong way, setting all the wheels of my composition going in creaking discord.
-- Miles Franklin

#Mother #Thinking #Wind

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.
-- Miles Franklin

#Thinking #Two #Parent

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.
-- Miles Franklin

#Selfish #Shoes #Views

Men always say there is no female Shakespeare.' 'Humph! You study the fellows who say that, and you'll see they are a long way from being Shakespeares themselves. Why shouldn't women have the same privilege?
-- Miles Franklin

#Men #Long #Way

Heed the spark or you may dread the fire ...
-- Miles Franklin

#Fire #Sparks #Slippery Slope

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.
-- Miles Franklin

#Men #Breathing #Silence

I never can see why they make such a fuss and get so frightened because wimmen does a thing or two now they usedn't to. Nothing short of a earthquake can make them not men an' wimmmen, an' that's the main thing.
-- Miles Franklin

#Men #Two #Earthquakes

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.
-- Miles Franklin

#Wise #Years #Generations

... we each have our fleeting hour.
-- Miles Franklin

#Fleeting #Hours

Before I was ten I became critical of the anthropomorphic God as interpreted in the churches. I did not warm to One thus revealed as the semblance of a bullying and mean old man who must have all his own way, be praised all the time and for attributes which were deplorable in us.
-- Miles Franklin

#Bullying #Mean #Men

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.
-- Miles Franklin

#Clever #Children #Careers

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 ...
-- Miles Franklin

#Art #Culture #Use

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

#Atheist #Heart #Atheism

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

#Autobiography

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

#Bible #People #Coward

Women can always think as much as they like, an' they could get up on a platform an' talk till they bust, as long as they didn't want the world to be made no better, an' they wouldn't be thought unwomanly. It's soon as a woman wants any practical good done that she is considered a unwomanly creature.
-- Miles Franklin

#Change #Thinking #Long

... no problem except old age ever vanquished my mother.
-- Miles Franklin

#Mother #Age #Problem

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

#Desire #Way #Condemnation

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 ...
-- Miles Franklin

#People #Age #Would Be

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

#Nature #Growing Up #Animal

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

#Art #People #Idiot

Bravely you jog along with the rope of class distinction drawing closer, close, tighter, tighter around you... I see it and know it, but I cannot help you... I am only an unnecessary, little, bush commoner, I am only a - woman.
-- Miles Franklin

#Women #Class #Drawing

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.
-- Miles Franklin

#Girl #Clever #Husband

When all is said and done, friendship is the only trustworthy fabric of the affections. So-called LOVE is a delirious inhuman state of mind: when hot it substitutes indulgence for fair play; when cold it is cruel, but friendship is warmth in cold, firm ground in a bog.
-- Miles Franklin

#Real #Love Is #Play

I'm sure it's not any wish of mine that I'm born with inclinations for better things. If I could be born again, and had the designing of myself, I'd be born the lowest and coarsest-minded person imaginable, so that I could find plenty of companionship, or I'd be born an idiot, which would be better still.
-- Miles Franklin

#Design #Wish #Would Be