Robyn Davidson Quotes

As times change, so do the way each generation see the world. It is rather like the way our generation came to see our grandparents' views on the Empire and colonies as outdated.

We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.

I think the 19th century is an extraordinary period with a welling up of creativity and all kinds of experimentation and exploration going on at least until 1940.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

When I began 'All Our Names,' I did so wanting to create parallel narratives between Africa in the nineteen-seventies and America during that same period.

Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large.

When I moved to Beijing in 2005 to write, I was accustomed to hearing the story of China's transformation told in vast, sweeping strokes - involving one fifth of humanity and great pivots of politics and economics.

I used to be called a post-modern clown. But now, post-modernism is a quaint notion, too.

I like to describe 'Yellowstone' is 'The Great Gatsby' on the largest ranch in Montana. Then it's really a study of the changing of the West.

As I told a friend of mine once who asked me why I joined Mercury, I think if I had been alive 150 years ago, I might have wanted to go out and help open up the West.

The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values.

Have you ever heard one civilized person whose opinion you respect, at any time, anywhere, in any civilized country anywhere, say the good new days?

Five-hundred years ago people were saying in manuscripts, "Can you believe these kids today?" They were saying that same phrase everyone says now. No one can believe the youth and what they're doing and how culture is going and how it might fall apart.

Go West, young man, go West. There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles.

A phenomenon occurs but because you're in the middle of it, you just think it's your life-until it's over. And then you look back and say, What an unusual thing happened to me in the '60s.

Niggers was the ones on the rope, hanging off the thing. Niggas is the ones with gold ropes,hanging out at clubs.

An adventure is never an adventure when it happens. An adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.

I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that's vanished - the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.

It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.

An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.

I had the naive, simplistic idea that producers and writers and artists of the time helped in a minuscule way to change the mind-set of America.

I'm not very nostalgic, you see. I just don't think anybody has that kind of thing anymore. By culture, by breeding, by whatever, it's not there. The kids today-what the hell are they going to be? I like young people - yes, I do. But when I talk to people at the schools, and they say, "I saw you on the Twit," I don't even know what they are talking about.

My dear, we live in an age of transition.

It's really interesting because 50 years ago, if you didn't wear a hat everyone looked at you. It just proves that everything is fashion.

I remember, like, literally saying - watching some cowboy-and-Indian movie with my mother, and I go, so, if we were back then, we'd be the Indians, right? She goes, yup, that's who we'd be. We wouldn't be those guys in the covered wagons. We'd be the Indians.