Tim Winton Quotes

And you know someone's special when you never get enough of them.

I didn't even know why I liked her. She was just there. I was used to her.

I wondered what I woulda done if I'd missed that euro. But that was like wondering what your life'd be like if your dad wasn't a douche.

Thing is, I'm not the surrendering type. Anyway I'm looking up and down that track. It was the highway or the wildywoods. That was the decision. Between something that's real and something you hope is real. I was banking everything on this call and maybe I wasn't fully right in the head by then but I went east. Roll the dice, that's me.

Mum said school mighta been different for me if I only give a damn. Maybe it was wasted on me like the teachers said. I didn't have any philosophy in me then, so I didn't know what to listen for. Most of it was pointless crap. Don't reckon I met a single wise person all the years I stayed but like I say, I wasn't paying close attention. And the thing is I miss it a bit. That's something I never thought I'd hear myself say. I didn't know what I was, what I could do. Except the lame things I did do.

Honestly, sometimes you'd rather be a dog. A mutt doesn't torture itself with thinking.

I shoulda been making proper plans to go right then. But I wasn't. You ever seen a chased rabbit give in running? When he just pulls up and stands there? Like he's out of puff and out of ideas and can't put two moves together anymore? Well that was me. I shoulda been gone already. It was like I was paralysed.

I knew what people thought. Clacktons, we were rubbish. Town like Monkton, one pub, roadhouse, rail silo and twelve streets, half of them empty, small enough everyone heard something and they all had a fucking opinion.

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

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

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

There was always a manic energy about Loonie, some strange hotwired spirit that made you laugh with shock. He hurled himself at the world. You could never second-guess him and once he embarked upon something there was no holding him back. Yet the same stuff you marvelled at could really wear you down. Some Mondays I was relieved to be back on the bus to school.

For all those years when Loonie and I surfed together, having caught the bug that first morning at the Point, we never spoke about the business of beauty. We were mates but there were places our conversation simply couldn't go. There was never any doubt about the primary thrill of surfing, the huge body-rush we got flying down the line with the wind in our ears. We didn't know what endorphins were but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became; from day one I was stoned from just watching. We talked about skill and courage and luck - we shared all that, and in time we surfed to fool with death - but for me there was still the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do.

Jim wanted to fish but he wanted his sons to do something else. He didn't want them to follow the standard White Point trajectory which meant bumping out of school at fifteen to end up in seaboots or prison greens.

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.