“Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer.”

“Ah! The world is a new and a wide one to you, But the world to your sweetheart is shut, For a change never comes to the lonely Bush girl From the stockyard, the bush, and the hut; And the only relief from the dullness she feels Is when ridges grow softened and dim, And away in the dusk to the sliprails she steals To dream of past meetings with him.”

“Oh, my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways, And deep ways and steep ways and high ways and low, I'm at home and at ease on a track that I know not, And restless and lost on a road that I know.”

“Do you think now and then, now or then, in the whirl Of the city, while London is new, Of the hut in the Bush, and the freckled-faced girl Who is eating her heart out for you?”

“Grey eyes that grow sadder than sunset or rain, Fond heart that is ever more true Firm faith that grows firmer for watching in vain--- She’ll wait by the sliprails for you.”

“You see the suffering of children all the time nowadays. Wars and famines are played out before us in our living rooms, and almost every week there are pictures of children who have been through unimaginable loss and horror. Mostly they look very calm. You see them looking into the camera, directly at the lens, and knowing what they have been through you expect to see terror or grief in their eyes, yet so often there’s no visible emotion at all. They look so blank it would be easy to imagine that they weren’t feeling much. And though I do not for a moment equate what I went through with the suffering of those children, I do remember feeling as they look. I remember Matt talking to me--- others as well, but mostly Matt--- and I remember the enormous effort required even to hear what he said. I was so swamped by unmanageable emotions that I couldn’t feel a thing. It was like being at the bottom of the sea.”

“If you try to make a shrimp boil, but the bag of spices bursts, and so you just toss it in along with whatever spices you can find in the pantry--you can make homemade pepper spray. Unintentionally.And everyone at your dinner party will run outside for the next hour, coughing and tearing up as if they've been maced, because technically they kind of have been, because mace was one of the spices I found in the panty. I blame whoever makes spice out of mace, and I remind my gasping dinner guests that even if I did mace them, I did it in an old fashioned, homemade, Martha Stewart sort of way. With love.”