It was Sunday, and Mumma had gone next door with Lena and the little ones. Under the pepper tree in the yard Pa was sorting, counting, the empty bott… - Patrick White

I can only stick my neck out and offer my humble beliefs. If I become an outsider by doing so, this won't be a great hardship as I've been that as far back as I can remember — something strange and unacceptable in the eyes of those who believe they see straight. At least it's given me courage of a kind, which I'd like every Australian to acquire.

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross.

She would have liked to love. It was terrible to think she had never loved her son as a man. Sometimes her hands would wrestle together. They were supple, rather plump hands, broad and not yet dry. But wrestling like this together, they were papery and dried-up. Then she would force herself into some deliberate activity or speak tenderly to her good husband, offering him things to eat, and seeing to his clothes. She loved her husband. Even after the drudgery of love she could still love him. But sometimes she lay on her side and said, I have not loved him enough, not yet, he has not seen the evidence of love. It would have been simpler if she had been able to turn and point to the man their son, but she could not.