Melina Marchetta

“I spent the whole morning looking at him. He looked at Mama. Mama looked at me. Then he would look at me. I would look at Mama. She would look at him. In different circumstances, I'd be amused.”

“I'd run you know. It's like when you're really busy doing something and you don't have time to think about things. Well, I'd run and run and run so I couldn't think.”

“Bribes over two dollars are tax deductible”

“And then he got all religious on her. Very quickly.- The Piper's Son”

“So what does the winner get in the end?" Tate asked."They get to sit around with the losers and say, 'I am King Xavier of the world.' Repeat after me.""And me?" Tate asked."You get to be my queen.""How come you're the leader of the community?" Narnie asked, almost smiling. "Why can't Tate be?"Webb looked at his sister, grinning. "Why can't you, Narnie?"Fitz leaned his head on Narnie's shoulder. "And I'll be your queen?""You can be the eunuch," Jude said, shoving him out of the way, "and I'll be her prince." He bowed and took Narnie's hand, kissing it, and their eyes met. It was awkward for a moment until Narnie looked away.”

“I look over to the other side of the road and watch Griggs as he walks. It’s a lazy walk but so full of confidence that you want to be standing behind him all the way.”

“Sometimes... sometimes keeping alive is too tiring," she whispered, wringing her hands. Before he knew what he was doing, he pressed his lips against her brow. "Don't ever say that. Ever.”

“You blame me for this, don't you?" he says."I don't need to. You're doing a better job.”

“She comes from the school of getting it out of your system, whereas he comes from the school of stewing over it.”

“No. But it's like the argument `don't donate to third-world countries because the money mightn't get to them.' People only say that because it makes them feel better about the fact that they do nothing.”

“The people I'm stuck with in my life now aren't sucking the life out of me, they just suck.”

“Everything's going to be fine. She'll be back at work soon. Let's just keep the house clean." Oh yeah, I want to say, because a clean house will result in peace in the Middle East as well.”

“They have a quick verbal exchange but only get to cover the alphabet from A to F, outdoing each other with the most choice of words.”

“And won’t he grow up to be the healthiest of young men, all because she kept him safe? Ready for the world. Ready to one day conquer it. To travel. Get on a train. Go to work. Get blown out of her life.Maybe she should be having that glass of wine and cigarette after all.”

“What about the contacts your mum had?” his dad asked.“I rang and spoke to four very polite computers who gave me all these options and then cut out on me. Then I tried the post office, because they were advertising, and I spoke to another computer. Very rude, that one. Don’t think it recognized ‘Are you shitting me?’ as an option.”“You know why that is?”“Why is that, Dominic?” Tom had asked drolly, because he knew he was going to be told why.“Because we don’t live in a society anymore, Tom. We live in an economy. We’re not citizens. We’re customers. That’s what this government’s done to us.”

“Love’s easy. It kind of comes with the territory. But liking is another story.”

“Even five minutes of your time can make someone’s day,”

“Does it help?” he asks. “The e-mailing.”She nods. “A tiny bit. It’s strange. You’re writing a letter to someone who’s never going to read it, so it kind of frees you up a bit.”

“She knows that feeling too. Of believing that each time someone says her name, it’s to tell her that something bad has happened.”

“They always prided themselves on looking youthful. “Forty’s the new thirty,” they’d joke.Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty’s the new one hundred.”

“Tom always did anger well. Hid it well, but showed it even better”

“She misses him more now than when he was away”

“Stani walks in later, glaring at them both.“Bloody bastards. One minute punching each other, next minute reading poetry. What’s wrong with everyone this week?”Tom can tell that”

“Play me something that makes me feel;This soul inside me is made of steel.Brain is breathing, but heart’s not beatingAnd, babe, I need you to make things real.Walk inside me without silence,Kill the past and change the tense.Empty gnawing and the ache is soaring;Take me places that make more sense.”

“Stop. Revive. Survive”

“Just say up on the hill is the meaning of life and someone knew it and they wanted everyone else to enjoy it. So they put a red vinyl sofa up there.”

“Worse still, he doesn’t know how to follow the piper anymore because it’s a path Tom has lost faith in.And the piper knows it. Tom can see it in his father’s eyes now. And the more he stares, the clearer it becomes.”

“But grieving people are selfish. They won’t let you comfort them and they say you don’t understand and they make you feel useless when all your life you’ve been functional to them.”

“..and how sometimes when she can’t get her clients talking about what happened over there she’ll get a map of the country, an appropriate map for their world, and pinpoint where they last lived, where their family went missing.Sometimes they would be reluctant to talk, but when they saw the map they would point to a place and say, “There. My village,”and that’s how their dialogue would begin. With a sense of place.”

“He came third in the state for woodwork,”Francesca explains. “We actually had to be proud of him for a whole week. Tough times.”

“Despite the voice in his head that says he doesn’t want anything that’s owed to his father, Tom can’t wait to get his hands on it.“Just take it. Hit your old man over the head with it. You’re dying to.”

“You can know someone all your life, like your parents or family, but I’ll tell you this, Ned. There’s an expression on their face, or a tone in their voice, or a way they walk, that you’ve never ever seen before.Like they’ve kept it hidden. Until their brother dies. Or their son. I remember those days and they were like these strangers and I wanted to say, Who are you people?”

“Come here,” she says.“No, you come here.”“I said it first.”“Rock paper scissors.”“No. Because you’ll do nerdy calculations and work out what I chose the last six times and then you’ll win.”Will pushes away from the table and his hand snakes out and he pulls her toward him and Tom figures that Will was always going to go to her first.”

“If I did something to hurt Frankie and she said that I was never getting near her heart again, I’d spent the rest of my life trying anyway. That’s the difference between you and me, Tom. I’d go back to the moment it all fell apart and I’d start there.”

“It’s all a bit of a gamble, mate. That’s all I can promise you.And we never get to see what that other life would have looked like if we don’t take chances.”

“They drive back home to grab his backpack and as he bends and kisses his grandma Agnes, she scrunches a one-hundred-dollar bill in his hand. “Buy yourself some chocolates, Tom.”It’s what she’d say to him as a kid with a twenty cent coin.”

“Anabel shrugs. “Then take an earlier flight today so you get to see her at the airport, stupid.”Tom shakes his head. “I came to see both of you. To spend time with my womenfolk because I miss you like hell.”They’re both smiling and he knows he has said and done the right thing and that’s enough for him. Anabel reaches over and hugs him. “You’re the best brother in the world, Tom.”When she pulls away from the hug, she slaps him on the cheek. “Are you over it now?” she snaps. “Let’s go!” she says, grabbing their mother’s keys out of her hands. “I’m sick and tired of you people living interstate and overseas from people you want to be with. You’re ruining my life! All of you!”

“I shrug. "I'll probably mention that I'm in love with you."He chuckles. "Only you would say that in such a I-think-I'll-wash-my-hair-tonight tone.”

“What were you doing with her?" I ask quietly."Apart from questioning her about your whereabouts, I was listening to the most intriguing story about my life moonlighting as a kidnapper.”

“I have one brother and I live with four hundred guys. Girls under the age of fourteen are the most frightening creatures I have ever come across.”

“Strange? I don't think that word comes anywhere near it. My troops are on an overnight camp three hundred kilometres away from here. I had to sleep at the Santangelo penitentiary for pre-pubescent girls.”

“...what was it like out there? Kind of describe it to us," Jessa says, beaming at them and then at me. Trini beams at her and there's a lot of beaming happening.”

“They separate us into groups. The Ringleaders and the Others. I belong to the Ringleaders because my weak, pathetic, traitorous, fundamentally base peers point to me when someone asks them who is in charge.”

“We look at each other for a moment and for once I feel awkward. It's not that I'm not into humility; I've just never had to practise it.”

“If something happened to me, whose face will be on the front page of the paper begging for me? Is a person worth more because they have someone to grieve for them?”

“We were playing Rock, Paper, Scissors," she told him once. "I was paper and she was rock so I lived and she died.”

“I want to be sitting in front of my computer, where you can press a button to block out your junk mail. These two are my junk mail.”

“According to Dickens, the first rule of human nature is self-preservation and when I forgive him for writing a character as pathetic as Oliver Twist, I'll thank him for the advice.”

“Someone asked us later, "Didn't you wonder why no one came across you sooner?"Did I wonder?When you see your parents zipped up in black body bags on the Jellicoe Road like they're some kind of garbage, don't you know?Wonder dies.”

“They were uninhibited when it came to music and sometimes the three of them had a tune inside their head that no one else could hear, and tonight it’s there between them and they’re fucking the space with their bodies.”