Tim Winton Quotes

There isn't one thing in the world hot and hard as knowing there's someone waiting, coming, pressing, wanting you.

But Paris was a black hole, somewhere where Jennifer came hard up against the wall of her limitations while all he could do was stand by and watch.

The also-rans will inherit the earth, the whelps, the meek and the fucking nice, and that's what he can no longer stand.

Sam followed [his father], loved him, listened to him talk. He believed deeply in luck, the old man, though he was careful never to say the word. He called it the shifty shadow of God. All his life he paid close attention to the movements of that shadow. He taught Sam to see it passing, feel it hovering, because he said it was those shifts that governed a man's life and it always paid to be ahead of the play. If the chill of its shade felt good, you went out to meet it like a droughted farmer goes out, arms wide, to greet the raincloud, but if you got that sick, queer feeling in your belly, you had to stay put and do nothing but breathe and there was a good chance it would pass you by. It was as though luck made choices, that it could think. If you greeted it, it came to you; if you shunned it, it backed away.

Another man, an American, had once told her in a high, laughing moment his theory of love. It was magic, he said. "The magic ain't real, darlin, but when it's gone it's over." Georgie didn't want to believe in such thin stuff, that all devotion was fuelled by delusion, that you needed some spurious myth to keep you going in love or work or service. Yet she'd felt romance evaporate often enough to make her wonder.

His wife was a good woman, and he understood that. But he remembered what the minister at Margaret River used to say - the good are fierce.

I suspect I only really liked her because she liked me first.

It only takes one thing to make you unhappy.

I knew I'd failed a test whose rules I didn't yet understand.

Nanna was the first dead person I ever saw. Her hair was blue against the pillow. And when me hand bumped her cheek she was cold and heavy and a kind of spark went through me, like a terrible familiar feeling. And I understood it then. She was meat. That's what dead things are.

Hoping is what people do when they're too lazy to do anything else.

She was sick of conversations with people passing through. Nothing you said to each other mattered a damn because you'd never see them again.

Tomorrow'll be a new day. Which is really the same miserable fucking day all over again.

I should have known earlier to always live like that.

Over the years Ida had fattened up. She sort of spread, like a garden gone wild.