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.
The world is, she would say. It just is, boy.
The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.
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...
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.
Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.
Io non ci credo, disse la donna. No, non ci credo. é una parola troppo piccola, non le pare signor Evans?Ho un'amica, a Fern Tree, che insegna pianoforte. è una donna molto musicale. Io non ho orecchi...
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.
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...
He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.
He continued to believe that, like everything else in his life, it would be righted by the sheer force of his will
For Amy, love was the universe touching, exploding within one human being, and that person exploding into the universe. It was annihilation, the destroyer of worlds.
Dorrigo Evans was unable to make head or tail of it. His tastes were in any case already ossifying into the prejudices of those who voyage far into classics in adolescence and rarely journey elsewhere...
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.
As they made their way to the coast, he bemoaned the hotel trade in the manner, Dorrigo felt, that those who love what they do bemoan their passion the most.
As the prisoners’ commanding officer and senior medical officer, Dorrigo Evans reported to Major Nakamura that four men had died the day before, two overnight, and that this left eight hundred and thi...
And in all his life around him, Darky Gardiner for the first time sensed his own death. He understood that all this would go on, and of him nothing would remain, that even his memory, though held by a...
After all, it wasn’t food; it was survival.
A world of dew and within every dewdrop a world of struggle. ISSA