You could never know when everything might change—a mood, a decision, a blanket. A life. They
Why do you love words so? he heard Amy ask. ... They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said.
What do the hieroglyphs tell us of what it was like to live under the lash, building the pyramids? Do we talk of that? Do we? No, we talk of the magnificence and majesty of the Egyptians. Of the Roman...
They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet. Beneath
These days he relied on the increasingly fragile assumption that what he said was right, and what was right was what he said.
There was, he knew, within him, hidden deep and far away, a great slumbering turbulence he could neither understand nor reach, a turbulence that was also a void, the business of unfinished things.
There was no meaning in it, not then and now now, but you can't write that, can you?
The story enchanted me, and I took to carrying the book with me everywhere, as if it were some powerful talisman, as if it contained some magic that might somehow convey or explain something fundament...
The imprisoning scent of jasmine that always awakened in him a desire to flee.
She took a puff, put the cigarette in the ashtray and stared at it. Without looking up, she said, But do you believe in love, Mr Evans? She rolled the cigarette end around in the ash tray. Do you? Out...
Rock to gravel to dust to mud to rock and so the world goes, as his mother used to say when he demanded reasons or explanation as to how the world got to be this way or that. The world is, she would s...
Perhaps if Tasmania had been a normal place where you had a proper job, spent hours in traffic in order to spend more hours in a normal crush of anxieties waiting to return to a normal confinement, an...
One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.
My disgraceful, wicked heart, thought Amy, is braver than the world. For a moment it seemed to Amy that there was nothing in the world she could not meet and vanquish. And though she knew this to be t...
Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who th...
It did not fit with the new age of conformity that was coming in all things, even emotions, and it baffled him how people now touched each other excessively and talked about their problems as though n...
I have a friend in Fern Tree who teaches piano. Very musical, she is. I'm tone-deaf myself. But one day she was telling me how every room has a note. You just have to find it. She started warbling awa...
He had forgotten the sharp taste of stone dust that hung around the broken village houses, the dead skinny donkeys’ smell and the dead wretched goats’ smell, the broken terraces’ smell and smashed oli...
He found in the time he was able to spend with Tom—by phone once a month and what became after a time an annual visit to Sydney in midwinter, and then, as his reputation grew and he travelled to Sydne...
He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.