John Marsden

“It's funny about a face, how big a difference it makes. I mean, one day you look in th mirror and you think, yeah, that's me, that's my face. And then another day...you think, that's not me, that's not my face. So am I my face? I mean is that all I am?”

“I don't want them hanging a double murder on me. It wouldn't look good on my school record.”

“‎"And suddenly they came out of the woodwork. I don't actually know what that expression means. What come out of the wood work? Cockroaches maybe. Mice? Are these rhetorical questions, like I just learned about on one of my rare visits to school? Was that a rhetorical question? Is it a paradox when you ask rhetorically if a rhetorical question is a rhetorical question? I think I'd better stop before I get a headache.”

“Name three types of olives.""Olives! I wouldn't know one type!""Well, there are three. You can get green ones, you can get black ones, or you can get stuffed.”

“Let’s go home,’ Homer said, ‘to Hell.”

“The human eye doesn’t look above its own height.”

“We’ve all had to rewrite the scripts of our lives the last few weeks. We’ve learnt a lot and we’ve had to figure out what’s important, what matters – what really matters. It’s been quite a time.”

“I remember Robyn saying once ‘Talking about yourself can be selfish or generous’. When I asked what she meant, she said: ‘If you never talk about yourself, about your problems and stuff, that’s selfish, because you’re not giving your friends a chance to help you. And if you talk about yourself all the time, you’re selfish and boring.”

“Live as though you’ll die tomorrow, but farm as though you’ll live forever.”

“We survived, Ellie, we survived.”

“Action is its own kind of thinking. We had to fight now: these people were a cancer who had crept into our stomachs and infected us all. We had to be surgeons, bold and clever, not thinkers and talkers.”

“That night in bed I was thinking about the way creeks and streams operate. They start off little, gurgling and bubbling and jumping over rocks and stuff, full of energy, going all over the place. Then they get older and bigger, become rivers, take a more definite course, stick to their path, know where they're going, get slower and wider. And eventually they reach the ocean and become part of this vast mysterious world of water that stretches away forever.Yep, just like people.”

“Don't treat people as you think they are, treat them as you think they are capable of becoming.”

“You're the most important person in my life," I said.He didn't say anything."You're my brother," I said.He didn't say anything."I love you, you little ratbag," I said.He smiled, snuggled down in the bed, and closed his eyes.”

“A few people would suffer, but a lot of people would be better off.''It's just not right,' said Kevin stubbornly. 'Maybe not. But neither's your way of looking at it. There doesn't have to be a right side and a wrong side. both sides can be right, or both sides can be wrong...”

“There’s life in his face again. It occurs to me that this is the best thing I could have done, it’s actually a great way to leave, because it’s giving Gavin the message that we haven’t been defeated, we are up for it, we’re young, we’re in control of our lives again, we can charge into the future with confidence. When we round the corner of the driveway I take his hand and we run down to the gate together.”

“It all began when... they're funny, those words. Everyone uses them, without thinking what they mean. When does anything begin? With everyone it begins when you're born. Or before that, when your parents got married. Or before that, when your parents were born. Or when your ancestors colonised the place. Or when humans came squishing out of the mud and slime, dropped off their flippers and fins, and started to walk. But all the same, all that aside, for what's happened to us there was quite a definite beginning”

“...."we saw this big dark red leech hanging off his back.We were dancing round yelling: ‘We’ll burn it off! Get the petrol! Staystill Mr Kassar, you can trust us!’He wimped out though, and made us use salt. Very boring.”

“Chris says his father was born on the corner of straight and narrow...”

“We believed we were safe. That was the big fantasy.”

“Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission”

“I can't describe the feeling when I go down – it's down down down and there's never going to be an up again. And whatever was good isn't good any more; white becomes grey, music becomes dictionaries, honey becomes beer and the sky a curdled lemon. There's no caramel anymore.”

“One of the things I find strangest and hardest is that we were having such conversations. We should have been talking about discos and electronic mail and exams and bands. How could this have been happening to us? How could we have been huddled in the dark bush, cold and hungry and terrified, talking about who we should kill? We had no preparation for this, no background, no knowledge. We didn’t know if we were doing the right thing, ever. We didn’t know anything. We were just ordinary teenagers, so ordinary we were boring. Overnight they’d pulled the roof off our lives. And after they’d pulled off the roof they’d come in and torn down the curtains, ripped up the furniture, burnt the house and thrown us into the night, where we’d been forced to run and hide and live like wild animals. We had no foundations, and we had no secure walls around our lives any more. We were living in a strange long nightmare, where we had to make our own rules, invent new values, stumble around blindly, hoping we weren’t making too many mistakes. We clung to what we knew and what we thought was right, but all the time those things too were being stripped from us. I didn’t know if we’d be left with nothing, or if we’d left with a new set of rules and attitudes and behaviours, so that we weren’t able to recognise ourselves any more. We could end up as new, distorted, deformed creatures, with only a few physical resemblances to the people we once were.”

“People, shadows, good, bad, Heaven, Hell: all of these were names, labels, that was all. Humans had created these opposites: Nature recognised no opposites. Even life and death weren’t opposites in Nature: one was merely an extension of the other.”

“It'd be funny if one of them was called Gavin. Funny but irrelevant.”

“A farm is just an accumulation of stories really. Same with people..."A farmer's footsteps are the best fertiliser," Dad used to say, which just means that the more you walk around your place the better everything seems to grow and flourish.”

“Anyway, I should have known better about the roses. Whatever Mum planted grew eventually. Take me for instance.”

“What happened next played itself out like a terrible drama with two spectators. Lee and I stayed on our side of the fence, like an audience. Of course if the bull had wanted to smash through the fence he could have done so any time, but luckily nearly all cattle live and die without learning that. It's like school, most students go from kindergarten to Year 12 without noticing that they could do a fair amount of damage if they wanted to. They stay inside the fence.”

“If people are either mountain people or ocean people then I'm a mountain person. I love the ocean, the few times I get a chance to see it, but I'm a mountain girl.”

“The only real enemy humans have is death. Every other enemy like a kid who slags you off at school or a cop who pulls you over you think they're enemies but they're not really. They're just I don't know irritations. But death that's the serious one because you know he'll win eventually. And that makes you like you've got to try to beat him. The bigger the challenge the harder you try. That's true of anything. In a way our enemies aren't these soldiers themselves our enemy is death and the soldiers are just his little local representatives." -Homer”

“There's nothing lonelier than grief. Sometimes I wanted to cry out to them all in the middle of History "Please please look at me help me can't you see how unhappy I am?"But what would have happened? They would have gathered round making soothing noises helping me out of the room maybe offering me tissues...and none of that would touch the deep dark ocean that circled silently inside. They could not see it touch it stop it. I didn't know any way to do that.”

“I knew I was breaking about a dozen laws but I guess I had different attitudes to stuff like that since the war. Laws were for the stupid the immature the irresponsible. The inflexible and the narrow-minded. The prejudiced. The obsessive. The lazy and careless and selfish and spoilt. The violent.”

“I wondered how long an adult could talk to a kid without using the word "but." About forty seconds'd be the record for most of them and that's on a good day.”

“Dad always said there were three types of workers. The ones who stood there saying "Is there anything I can do " and did nothing. Most of our city guests were like that. The ones who said "Tell me what you want done and I'll do it" and did. Most of our workers over the years had been like that. And the ones who didn't say anything but were always a jump or two ahead of you. When you were changing a flat tyre and you took the old one off and turned to pick up the new one they'd already have it in their hands and they'd move in and put it on from your left while you were still turning round to the right. Dad reckoned one of those was worth two or the second type and five of the first type.”

“I really believe that our stories make us who we are. I don't think people are born as empty shells. They already have the makings of a personality and they have intelligence. But from the moment they're born and maybe before that they start accumulating stories and it's those stories that have the biggest effect on them.”

“If you added up all the really significant episodes in your life they'd probably come to less than sixty minutes.”

“Pale as ice you passed me by; I wondered what you really felt, And waited through the changing times, To see if you would one day melt. I thought that ice would melt with warmth, But there were thing I did not know: The sun can touch the outer layers But does not reach the deepest snow. Winter sometimes seems like years, Summer's sometimes far away, But winter always turns to summer, As surely as does night to day.”

“Mr. Lindell's English classes are meant to make you think I guess about yourself and people and everything. Some of the kids say it's pretty weird but they're more honest in English than they are anywhere else and they say more about what they feel...Everything that's said in English etches itself clearly and sharply in my mind like letters carved neatly into deep frost. But I never let them see how eagerly I listen.”

“I wonder if they realize how much I notice about them They probably haven't a clue because I never look at them or show the slightest interest. But I'm very aware of everything. I remember seeing an old film once where a father says to his son: "Son when your mouth's open you're not learning anything." If that's true then I'm well on the way to becoming the world's wisest woman.”

“The Bible just said ‘Thou shalt not kill’, then told hundreds of stories of people killing each other and becoming heroes, like David with Goliath.”

“This is the most complicated relationship since Romeo and Juliet," she complained. "You'reboth hopeless. I mean, what is the big problem? You love him. He adores you. You get together and live happily ever after. Anyquestions? No, of course not. That'll be ten dollars, thank you.”

“At that age you think boys have as much personality as coat hangers and, you don't notice their looks.Then you grow up.”

“It's good to keep changing your mind. It shows you're thinking. I'll only stop changing my mind when I'm dead. And maybe not even then.”

“Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.”

“Writing is not a job or activity. Nor do I sit at a desk writing for inspiration to strike. Writing is like a different kind of existence. In my life, for some of the time, I am in an alternative world, which I enter through day-dreaming or imagination. That world seems as real to me as the more tangible one of relationships and work, cars and taxes. I don't know that they're much different from each other.”

“We had enough years in front of us to be serious and grown-up and respectable. Why rush it? But on the other hand we always complained when teachers and other adults treated us as kids. In fact there was nothing that annoyed me more. So it was a frustrating situation. What we needed was a two-sided badge that said 'Mature' on one side and 'Childish' on the other. Then at any moment we could turn it to whatever side we felt like being and the adults could treat us accordingly.”

“There are some things that once you've lost, you never get back. Innocence is one. Love is another. I guess childhood is a third.”

“I was deeply impressed by the fact that my life could lose three days without my having any awareness of it. Maybe this was a preview of death: continuous visions and dreams and vague glimpses of reality. Only with death you never wake up: you keep having the weird images forever.”

“We weren't creatures from another planet. We were creatures from Hell.”

“I didn't confess how wrecked I was. Let them keep thinking I was Superwoman if they wanted. I knew the truth.”