“I'm a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that's me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I'd die; I don't know what of, I just knew I'd die.”

“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.”

“You can never stay angry too long in the bush though. At least, that's what I think. It's not that it's soothing or restful, because it's not. What it does for me is get inside my body, inside my blood, and take me over. I don't know that I can describe it any better than that. It takes me over and I become part of it and it becomes part of me and I'm not very important, or at least no more important than a tree or a rock or a spider abseiling down a long thread of cobweb. As I wandered around, on that hot afternoon, I didn't notice anything too amazing or beautiful or mindbogglingly spectacular. I can't actually remember noticing anything out of the ordinary: just the grey-green rocks and the olive-green leaves and the reddish soil with its teeming ants. The tattered ribbons of paperbark, the crackly dry cicada shell, the smooth furrow left in the dust by a passing snake. That's all there ever is really, most of the time. No rainforest with tropical butterflies, no palm trees or Californian redwoods, no leopards or iguanas or panda bears.Just the bush.”

“‎"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.”

“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?”

“But it was my parents I longed for mostly. I wanted to be a little girl again and cuddle into them, wriggling in between them like I'd done in their bed when I was three or four, snug and warm in the safest place in the world.Instead I had Hell.”

“Sometimes I think I'd rather be frightened than bored. At least when you're frightened you know you're alive.”