Miles Franklin Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Heed the spark or you may dread the fire.