Maybe we just get given our faces, our lives, our fates, our happiness and unhappiness. Some get a lot, some bugger all. And love the same. Like different glass sizes for beer. You get a lot, you get...
Life was a bit about luck. Mostly though, it was a stacked deck. Life was only about getting the next footstep right.
Lest we forget, we say, Bonox Baker said. Isn’t that what we say, sir? We do, Bonox. Or incant. Perhaps it’s not quite the same thing. So that’s why it should be saved. So it’s not forgotten. Do you k...
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.
In the end all that was left was the heat and the clouds of rain, and insects and birds and animals and vegetation that neither knew nor cared. Humans are only one of many things, and all these things...
I tried to write what I remembered of the day. It sounded terrible and noble all at once. But it wasn't any of those things.
Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo.
He continued to believe that, like everything else in his life, it would be righted by the sheer force of his will
Darky was always looking for the good thing, no matter how small, and consequently he often found it.
But sometimes things are said and they’re not just words. They are everything that one person thinks of another in a sentence. Just one sentence.
A world of dew and within every dewdrop a world of struggle. ISSA
Under the influence of mercury, which he administered to himself daily as a salve for his syphilis, & laudanum, which he drank each evening in imprecisely measured amounts to enable him to sleep, beca...
To die of old age...is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death. It is the last and extremist kind of dying. It encourages people to lead a life devoted to not dying, which is really another way of n...
They talked about fishing, food, winds and stonework; about growing tomatoes, keeping poultry and roasting lamb, catching crayfish and scallops; telling tales, jokes; the meaning of their stories noth...
The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.
The God way. Talking about God this and God that. Fuck God, he had actually wanted to say. Fuck God for having made this world, fucked be his name, now and for fucking ever, fuck God for our lives, fu...
Maybe he doesn’t really think it now. But sometimes things are said and they’re not just words. They are everything that one person thinks of another in a sentence. Just one sentence.
I shall be a carrion monster, he whispered into the coral shell of her ear, an organ of women he found unspeakably moving in its soft, whorling vortex, and which always seemed to him an invitation to...
For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it c...
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...