“What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?”

“Always to be pushing out like this, beyond what I know cannot be the limits - what else should a man's life be?”

“I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.”

“What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.”

“The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact.”

“That is what life meant, a unique presence, and it was essential in every creature.”

“Now as I began to sort through his “effects” it occurred to me how little I had really known him … I had forced upon my father the character that fitted most easily with my image of myself; to have had to admit to any complexity in him would have compromised my own.”