Quotes from Emily Maguire

That's what Jamie didn't understand: it was never just sex. Even the fastest, dirtiest, most impersonal screw was about more than sex. It was about connection. It was about looking at another human being and seeing your own loneliness and neediness reflected back. It was recognising that together you had the power to temporarily banish that sense of isolation. It was about experiencing what it was to be human at the basest, most instinctive level. How could that be described as just anything?

But then, life is a constant withering of possibilities. Some are stolen with the lives of people you love. Others are let go, with regret and reluctance and deep, deep sorrow. But there is compensation for lives unlived in the intoxicating joy of knowing that the life you have - right here, right now - if the one you have chosen. There is power in that, and hope.

Real love should draw no blood from the loved and buckets from the lover.

The thing I never understood about love is that it can't be quelled, like lust can. With love, if you follow its call, if you give in to it, it just gets worse. The more you have, the deeper you go, the more you need.

Sarah learnt a lot from Alex. Like the way men could say one thing, then another, then act in a way inconsistent with both positions and somehow still be convinced of their own integrity.

And reading this way - with no deadline, no agenda - she remembered why she loved literature so much. It was like fucking a new man and knowing that he had made other women come, but that when she came it would be an unshareable, untranslatable pleasure. She opened herself up to her books, and the words got inside her and fucked her senseless.

It was disconcerting that being in love felt lonelier than lonelines.

Fucking was poetry unbound.

The loss of her is already too much and then there's the other thing – the end of being loved in the way only my sister could love me. What I feel for her survives and that hurts like battery acid every minute, but worse is that what she felt for me died with her. I will never be loved like that again.

As Nic said, second-hand clothes were like day drinking, government handouts and having a lawyer: classy if you're rich, proof you're trash if you're poor.

Do something a bit shit, like getting in a fight outside the TAB or getting a DUI, and people around here will bag the hell out of you. But something beyond the pale - beat your wife, hurt your kid, stalk a bloke because you think he murdered your sister - those things go unspoken.

And the worst thing, the unsurvivable thing, is understanding that there exist people who know in their flesh the truth of all this. They know it because they created it, created hell with their bare hands and then just kept on living, kept on as though they never stopped the world.

She was seventy-three, a widow, came in every night looking like the Queen, drank her body weight in gin and left looking like an unmade bed.

We wish to express our gratitude for the love, concern and support we have received from friends and strangers throughout this last, horrific week. While we appreciate that the media must report on crimes and their consequences, we respectfully point out that our pain is not breaking news nor does it constitute a development in the case. We therefore ask that you allow us to grieve our beloved Bella in privacy.

May fiddled with her phone, reminding herself she was good at this and in control and that getting the story was more important than feminist principles – or no, not even that, it was that feminist principles demanded she tell the truth about this heinous act of violence against a woman and the blokey, misogynist community in which it happened, and if that required flirting with one or more of said blokey, misogynist community members then that was for the greater good.

Might it also be that creating narratives around murder allows a measure of comfort? Murder in the abstract is terrifying; in the details, you realise it has nothing to do with you.

People ask if what I've been through has made me afraid and of course, it has. But not of monsters. Only of those who insist they exist.