It is not that you know nothing about war, young man, Dorrigo Evans had said. It is that you have learnt one thing. And war is many things.
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 did not believe he was unique or that he had some sort of destiny. In his own heart he felt all such ideas were a complete nonsense, and that death could find him at any moment, as it was now findi...
He believed books had an aura that protected him, that without one beside him he would die. He happily slept without women. He never slept without a book.
Dorrigo, the children, her friends, and her wider family - they all existed for her as a way of divining the world. It was a far larger and more wondrous place with them than it was without them. If s...
And this grey spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
To judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!
الحرب كائنات بشرية. الحرب هي ما نمثله نحن. الحرب هي ما نفعله
Watching his brother, Dorrigo Evans had wondered what it was that would make a grown man cry. Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Feeling became f...
Things bled. They bled and bled and would not stop bleeding. There would be no dramatic end, she realised, only a slow withering […] bleeding and more bleeding.
They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet.
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 no meaning in it, not then and now now, but you can't write that, can you?
Szczęśliwy człowiek nie ma przeszłości, a nieszczęśliwy nie ma nic poza nią
One man's feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all.
No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pretending otherwise is the road to hell.
It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible. It's believing in reality that does us in every time.
It had been a day to die, not because it was a special day but because it wasn't, and every day was a day to die now, and the only question that pressed on them, as to who might be next, had been answ...