I should have known earlier to always live like that. - Tim Winton

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.

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.

Why was it that he didn't know a thing about the underlying nature of people, the shadows and shifts, the hungers and hopes that caused them to do the things they did?