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Joseph Furphy Quotes
1843–1912 Australia
Joseph Furphy (Irish: Seosamh Ó Foirbhithe; 26 September 1843 – 13 September 1912) was an Australian author and poet who is widely regarded as the father of the Australian novel. He mostly wrote under the pseudonym Tom Collins and is best known for his novel Such Is Life (1903), regarded as an Australian classic.
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15 quotes
Our virgin continent! how long has she tarried her bridal day!
Comedy is tragedy, plucked unripe.
Age cannot limit him, nor use exhaust his infinite mendacity.
Pritchard senior died of some unpronounceable scientific term signifying internal haemorrhage of irascibility and malevolence.
I have just finished writing a full-sized novel; title, Such is Life; scenery, Riverina and northern Vic.; temper, democratic; bias, offensively Australian.
Farce is the grimmest of all tragedy; it is the blind jollity of an Irish wake, with the silent guest none the less present because unassertive.
Ah me! the husband once found out has no remedy that I can think of.
We find it so much easier, you will observe, to forgive our own shortcomings than the imperfections of our ladye-loves. This 'tis to be married; this 'tis to have linen and buck-baskets. Ay de mi!
The successful pioneer is the man who never spared others; the forgotten pioneer is the man who never spared himself, but, being a fool, built houses for wise men to live in, and omitted to gather moss. The former is the early bird; the latter is the early worm.
Now, I have a theory that women do not love their husbands ... I hold that married life is a long-drawn ordeal, which no man short of a Chevalier Bayard has any business to face ...
I compare tracking to reading a letter written in a good business hand. You must'nt look at what's under your eye; you must see a lot at once, and keep a general grasp of what's on ahead, besides spotting each track you pass.
... each man, be he king or beggar, is a little world of his own. If he be swayed by a female, as kings and beggars frequently are, he is an extremely little world.
The two greatest supra-physical pleasures of life are antithetical in operation. One is to have something to do, and to know that you are doing it deftly and honestly. The other is to have nothing to do, and to know that you are carrying out your blank programme like a good and faithful menial.
Why is Hamlet never a favourite with the woman-student? Merely because she sees him morally vivisected, and illustrated (so to speak) with coloured plates. Ophelia loved him as the glass of fashion, and so forth; but when he groaned he was no longer a god; when he raised his arabesqued wings, he disclosed the segmented and woolly body common to the Lepidoptera—and all was over.
His arrogance was not without grounds. He more than once unbent himself to confide to my own dad that he (the deponent, not my good old plebeian dad, for heaven's sake!) was the illegitimate son of an illegitimate son of George IV.
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