Joseph Furphy

Better we were cold and still, with our famous Jim and Bill, Beneath the interdicted wattle-bough, For the angels made our date five-and-twenty years too late, And there is no for us now.

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!

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 ...

His one positive quality was mendacity. ... He could lie. His style was ornate, yet reposeful; microscopically exact, yet large and sublime. You could sit down and rest in the cool shade of one of his fabrications.

Ah me! the husband once found out has no remedy that I can think of.

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. loved him as the glass of fashion, and so forth; but when he groaned he was no …

Pritchard senior died of some unpronounceable scientific term signifying internal haemorrhage of irascibility and malevolence.

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 .

Age cannot limit him, nor use exhaust his infinite mendacity.

... 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.

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.

Comedy is tragedy, plucked unripe.

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 …

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.

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 …

I have just finished writing a full-sized novel; title, Such is Life; scenery, and northern Vic.; temper, democratic; bias, offensively Australian.