Marcus Clarke

“A Marcus Clarke Reader, ed. Bill Wannan (Melbourne, 1963)”

“To describe a tempest of the elements is not easy, but to describe a tempest of the soul is impossible.”

“I have examined you long enough. I have read your heart, and written out your secrets! You are but a shell—the shell that holds a corrupted and sinful heart. He shall live; you shall die!”

“Take care what you say! I'll have no hard words. Wretch! If I am a wretch, who made me one? If I hate you and myself and the world, who made me hate it? I was born free—as free as you are. Why should I be sent to herd with beasts, and condemned to this slavery, worse than death?”

“Convictism having been safely got under hatches, and put to bed in its Government allowance of sixteen inches of space per man, cut a little short by exigencies of shipboard, the cuddy was wont to pass some not unpleasant evenings.”

“Men change their dispositions as they change their climate.”

“Everything he touched turned to gold. When he married an heiress even she died of the yellow fever.”

“He couldn't be content with small profits, so he took to cards, and was shot aboard a river steamboat. God bless him. He died like a hero, with a king up his sleeve.”

“It takes two persons to make a Proper Friendship. The one has to be befriended, the other to be friendly. I'd rather be the friendly man by a darned sight. He gets all the fat off the mutual leg of mutton, and not unfrequently scrapes the bone.”

“Friendship, if you know how to work it, is better than a cousin in Parliament.”

“Bouncer was a friend of mine, and when I was going to be married to Miss Tallon, with £50,000, Bouncer said, 'Q., introduce me, old fellow, as your friend! I did; and in six weeks he married the lady. My only consolation was that her father became insolvent before the end of the year.”

“No poor man can afford to have many friends. They would ruin him. Indeed, friendship is a luxury which should be indulged in with caution even by the rich.”

“I have had many friends, like the hare in the fable, but most of them didn't pay expenses. Friendship is like mining; sometimes you drop into a good thing, but the majority of places are duffers.”

“Friends as a rule are a mistake.”

“As Mr Burnett said to me long ago, 'Q———, you will never be one of us. You have ruined your constitution by early temperance.'”

“I am not a teetotaller — at least, not now. I used to be, but my constitution is not strong, and I could not stand the dissipation.”

“I used to drink so that the publicans, when they went out of business, used to sell me among the valuable fixtures.”

“I used to be a dreadful fellow — nearly as bad as the drunkards in the storybook. I have been drunk for a year and a-half at a stretch. It was natural for me to drink. When I was about three days and a-half old, I saw my nurse hide a brandy bottle away in a cupboard that she couldn't get at afterwards. I never said anything about it then, but as soon as I could walk, I got the keys and drank that brandy.”

“They are the cream of the social bowl—in their own estimation. The stone pillars which, according to the Arabic legend, hold the earth up. There never was, or can be, anything to equal them. You may be the best fellow in the world, the sole support of an aged mother, and the protector of a whole boarding-schoolful of orphan sisters. You may work like a horse, and give all your goods to feed the poor, but if you are not a Business Man, you are sounding brass or tinkling cymbal. To be a Business Man is a special gift—a sort of inherent virtue, like a cast in the eye.”

“A Man of Business is one who becomes possessed of other people's money without bringing himself under the power of the law.”