Maybe a lot of people never know love. The idea had never occurred to Dorrigo Evans. Maybe not. Maybe we just get given our faces, our lives, our fates, our happiness and unhappiness. Some get a lot,...
In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.
He understood that he shared certain features, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him. He’d just had more success at living than at dying,
He loved his family. But he was not proud of them. Their principal achievement was survival. It would take him a lifetime to appreciate what an achievement that was.
He had the sourdough smell of age. His chest sagged into shrivelled teats; his lovemaking was unreliable, yet she found it strangely wholesome in a way that defied sense.
He felt more soft raindrops, saw bright-red oil against the brown mud, heard his mother calling again, but it was unclear what she was saying, was she calling him home or was it the sea? There was a w...
Being prisoner great shame. Great! Redeem honour building railway for Emperor. Great honour. Great!
And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office...
After all, it wasn’t food; it was survival.
He understood the measure of his life now to be his capacity to believe in something - anything - other than what was happening in front of him. So they saw, but they did not see; so they heard, but t...
If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday -...
Possibly
In the back seat the three now silent, soot-smeared children absorbed it all—the choking creosote stench, the roar of wind and flame, the wild rocking of a car being driven that hard, the heat, the em...
Though every dead man is a reduction of their number, the thousand POWs who first left Changi as Evans’ J Force—an assortment of Tasmanians and West Australians surrendered in Java, South Australians...
There grew between him and Ella a conspiracy of experience, as if the raising of children, the industry of supporting each other in ways practical and tender, and the sum of years and then decades of...
The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.
So they saw, but they did not see; so they heard, but they did not hear; and they knew, they knew it all, but still they tried not to know.
She was full of yearning. To leave, to be someone else, somewhere else, to start moving and never stop. And yet the more the innermost part of her screamed to move, the more she recognised that she wa...
My purpose holds, To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars until I die.
Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the univer...