Novelists From Australia

"Maybe we didn't pray hard enough. Perhaps we should kneel down like is done in church. Perhaps were using the wrong name. Instead of God, let's say "Our Leader." Let's pray to our leader for candy! Let's pray extra specially hard, and don't open your eyes until I say."

"God bless mommy and daddy, and please can we have some candy."

"Perhaps my mommy should go back to school. Perhaps she should."

"Your daddy had to go back to school a little. He had some strange thoughts — and he wanted other grown-ups to believe them. It's not right for others to believe wrong thoughts, is it?"

"I want a star!"

"It is a very pretty flag. … I wish I could have a piece of it. I know! If it's so important, I think we should all have a piece of it. Don't you? … Now we should decide — who should be allowed to cut the first piece off!"

"Your old teacher never explained anything to you? I don't think that was very good. Not to explain. You can always ask me anything. That's what a real teacher should do."

"Just a moment, children — what does "pledge" mean?"

"Changi changed everyone, changed values permanently. For instance, it gave you a dullness about death — we saw too much of it to have the same sort of meaning to outsiders, to normal people. We are a generation of dinosaurs, we the few who survived. I suppose anyone who goes to war, any war, sees life with different eyes if they end up in one piece." What did you see?" "A lot of bull that's worshipped as the be-all and end-all of existence. So much of 'normal, civilized' life is bull that you can't imagine. … What frightens you, doesn't frighten me, what frightens me, you'd laugh at."

"So much wealth and so much power, Armstrong thought, yet with a little luck, we can bring you down like Humpty-Dumpty..."

"Only by living at the edge of death can you understand the indescribable joy of life."

"First she studied her husband's flower arrangement. He had chosen the blossom of a single white wild rose and put a single pearl of water on the green leaf, and set it on red stones. Autumn is coming, he was suggesting with the flower, talking through the flower, do not weep for the time of fall, the time of dying when the earth begins to sleep; enjoy the time of beginning again and experience the glorious cool of the autumn air on this summer evening...soon the tear will vanish and the rose, only the stones will remain — soon you and I will vanish and only the stones will remain."

"What are clouds, but an excuse for the sky? What is life, but an escape from death?"

"There are no "mitigating circumstances" when it comes to rebellion against a sovereign lord."

"To think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline — training — is about."

"All his life he had heard legends told among pilots and sailormen about the incredible riches of Portugal's secret empire in the East, how they had by now converted the heathens to Catholicism and so held them in bondage, where gold was as cheap as pig iron, and emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and sapphires as plentiful as pebbles on a beach. If the Catholic part's true, he told himself, perhaps the rest is too."

"When you have an enemy it is wise to know his ways. The King knew as much about Grey as any man could know about another."

"Grey was not alone in his hatred. The whole of Changi hated King. They hated him for his muscular body, the clear glow in his blue eyes. In the twilight world of the half alive there were no fat or well-built or round or smooth or fair-built or thick-built men. There were only faces dominated by eyes and set on bodies that were skin over sinews and bones. No difference between them but age and face and height. And in all this world, only the King ate like a man, smoked like a man, slept like a man, dreamed like a man and looked like a man."

"I'm going to get that bloody bastard if I die in the attempt."

"Changi was set like a pearl on the eastern tip of Singapore Island, iridescent under the bowl of tropical skies. It stood on a slight rise and around it was a belt of green, and farther off the green gave way to the blue-green seas and the seas to infinity of horizon. Closer, Changi lost its beauty and became what it was — an obscene forbidding prison. Cellblocks surrounded by sun-baked courtyards surrounded by towering walls. Inside the walls, inside the cellblocks, story on story, were cells for two thousand prisoners at capacity. Now, in the cells and in the passageways and in every nook and cranny lived some eight thousand men. ... These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived."

"For Those Who Were There And Are Not. For Those Who Were There And Are For Him. But Most, For Her."

"You can't go through life sitting on the fence. You've got to make decisions, and sometimes you're pretty sure to make them wrong."

"All good designers are difficult men or they could not be good designers; I think everybody at the table was more or less aware of that. We set ourselves to mollify the great man, and I say that with sincerity. A great man he was, a great designer, and a superlative engineer. But not an easy man to deal with. No."

"He was a dark-haired, fresh-faced boy of twenty-one or twenty-two, who adopted the pose that everything was a joke and nothing really mattered."

"He was like a little boy let loose in a toy shop, uncertain which of the attractive treasures to pick up first."

"She did not understand what all that meant, but it was evidently something very near his heart, and so she said, "How splendid!""

"Success did not thrill him in the least. He regarded a success merely as a convenient platform from which to plan a further advance."

"Whatever the little man showed him or explained, the designer did nothing but grunt. This was one of his more offensive techniques; he would stand in silence listening to a halting explanation and then grunt, a grunt expressing an ill-tempered scepticism or plain disbelief."

"If you're going to make your life in a new country you should go before you're twenty-five. After that you start to get associations, little grooves and anchors, that make it difficult to change."

"A wiser man than I once said that an unusual man is apt to look unusual. In my department we seek for original thinkers, for the untiring brain that pursues its object by day and by night. If the untiring brain refuses to leave its quest to attend to such matters as the neat arrangement of collar and tie or to removing food stains from its waistcoat, I do not greatly complain."

"They sat by the lake for a couple of hours, talking, finding out about each other."

"She said, "When you've seen all the new places you've got no more new places to see. And anyway, one new place is just like another new place. . . . I used to like meeting new people every trip - and I still do. But those things, meeting new people, seeing new places, they aren't everything. And while you go on in that sort of life you can't have any real friends or any real home. Because you're never there . . .""

"She recognised in Mr Honey a man of moods, capable of deep depression; all geniuses, she had read, were men like that."

"Personal unpleasantness always upset his work; he could not think clearly if his mind was full of hard things that had been said about him, and he liked thinking clearly. Rows frightened him; he would go to considerable lengths to avoid them."

"For many years the actress had been out of touch with the hard realities of life. All her working life had been spent in the facile world of honky-tonk, of synthetic emotion and of phoney glamour. Now she was getting a glimpse into a new world, a world of hard, stark facts, a world in which things had to be exactly right or people would be killed. She was beginning to perceive that little insignificant men like Mr Honey were the brains behind that world."

"Airline stewardesses are not chosen for their repellent qualities, and Miss Corder was a very charming girl."

"His agitation was subsiding; already he was becoming aware that he had not got it in him to make these men believe that what he said was true. He had had so much of this in the past; he was accustomed to being right and being disbelieved on vital issues. It was what happened to him; other people could put across their convictions and win credence, but he had never been able to do that. Now it was happening again."

"Environment has its effect on everybody, and for a time it had a numbing effect on him, preventing him from thinking clearly."

"People believe what they want to believe."

"It has been said that an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound; if that be so, we were certainly engineers."

"He was one of that great class of Englishmen who love their wives and trust them unquestioningly with their money and their honour, but are apt to hedge a little over their motor-cars."

"Differential equations won't help you much in the design of aeroplanes — not yet, anyhow."

"There are moments when my mind misses a beat. I find myself, in mid-step or mid-breath, feeling as if delivered abruptly into my body after a long absence (spent where, I could not say), or a long, dreamless sleep. I lose not my memory, merely my thread. My attention has inexplicably wandered, but a little calm introspection restores my context and brings me peace. Almost peace."

"The Universe may be stranger than we can imagine, but it's going to have a tough time outdoing Egan."

"There are times when it’s worth putting aside the endless myopic navel-gazing that occupies so much literature, in order to look out at the universe itself and value it for what it is."

"[T]hat most beings would prefer to continue to exist once they exist is not in itself a good reason for bringing them into existence, it’s merely a good argument against murder."

"If we spend all our time gazing at the wonders ahead without remembering where we're standing right now, we're going to trip and fall flat on our face, over and over again."

"The swell was gently lifting and lowering the boat. My breathing grew slower, falling into step with the creaking of the hull, until I could no longer tell the difference between the faint rhythmic motion of the cabin and the sensation of filling and emptying my lungs. It was like floating in darkness: every inhalation buoyed me up, slightly; every exhalation made me sink back down again."

"All right. He's dead. Go ahead and talk to him."

"The truth is whatever you can get away with." "No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape."