I am rather good at it. I have been always borrowing. If I can borrow nothing else, I borrow ideas. - Marcus Clarke

To describe a tempest of the elements is not easy, but to describe a tempest of the soul is impossible.

Everything he touched turned to gold. When he married an heiress even she died of the yellow fever.

The Australian black is as far removed from and Chingachook, as Uncas and Chingachook are from reality. ... An Australian Romeo would bear his Juliet off with the blow of a club, and Juliet would prepare herself for her bridal by "greasing herself from head to foot with the kidney-fat of her lover's rival." Poor Paris! ... No genius among them has ever invented a net or a snare. ... A child every two years is considered enough for any reasonable mother, and should she indulge in more, the indignant father cracks its skull against the nearest tree. Nothing is new, we see,—not even Social Science.