Quotes from Peter Carey

The cicadas, as if they were wired on the same circuit, suddenly filled the garden with a loud burst of celebration.

It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat Bitter according to your mood.

And in it's magical pattern there was now a new element, a new glow, a cast of a golden colour which suffused everything, the source of which was a character in a book he had half read of and would never finish. He was not interested in what happened to Jay Gatsby. He was only interested that Jay Gatsby should exist.

She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant

She felt his personality to be round and smooth and free from nasty spikes.

She meant I was hungover. I had been slaughtered, legless, trolleyed, slashed, shredded, plastered, polluted, pissed. I thought, I do love my country's relationship with alcohol. How would I ever exist in the United States? I suppose I would have grief counselling instead. (77)

The camera observed me, but there was nothing in my bag except a pashmina, purse, and Lorazepam. I carried emptiness. Doors opened. Another camera recorded my progress. Doubtless there were thousands of my days repeated thus, interred digitally in limbo. I ascended two steps with nothing to look forward to

For all the things that had happened to her, all the people she had met, the miles of ocean she had covered, she could feel nothing worth writing except: 'an exceedingly grand apartment which I spoil by the excess of irritation and agitation I carry with me everywhere...

No matter what skullduggery and death Fitzy later caused no matter how great a coward & liar he proved himself I still believe he never wanted no more than this in life and when he danced with that bosomy Belinda at Mrs Robinson's there were no malice in him.

She thought: When we are two, they do not notice us. They think us a match. What wisdom does a mob have? It is a hydra, an organism, stupid or dangerous in much of its behaviour, but could it have, in spite of this, a proper judgement about which of its component parts fit best together?

His great carved wooden head was marked with a black eye that was more yellow than black and from this spectacular bed of bruised flesh the eye itself, sand irritated, bloodshot, as wild as a currawong's, stared out at a landscape in which the tops of fences protruded from windswept sand.

You're discussing recreational drugs?" He stood and shut the door and came back looking very serious indeed. I was chastened, as I should have been. "Sorry. What have I never minded about?" "Well, I have truthfully always imagined it was my talent, my gift to introduce my friends to each other. Not one I could ever use for my own happiness, I must say.

it was born out of habits of mind produced by Christianity: that if you sacrificed yourself you would somehow attain the object of your desires. It was a knife of an idea, a cruel instrument of sacrifice...

The hydrangeas are clipped for the winter and there is a gardener with rum on his breath (and odd socks on his feet) who offers to show you the scars on his back, the droppings of a wallaby, the scratchings of a bandicoot or a leech which he will pull inside out with the aid of a twig- T'only way to kill'un, missus.

They had sat here, in this very room, their knees almost touching, and there had been a sense of almost breathless discovery, and while they had not become lovers everything was laid out, like a feast, and they were merely arranging the table decorations and putting out the place names, the final little touches, so that when the feast began it would have been a splendid thing, not only satisfying to the baser appetites but to the higher senses.

chooks. You cannot go away and leave

Remember, this is the country of the duck-billed platypus. When you are cut off from the rest of the world, things are bound to develop in interesting ways.

He would never believe, in his wildest dreams ,that she no longer loved him. She had said it once, but he would dismiss these sorts of things as temperament or wine as if a bottle contained an infusion of foreign thoughts with which she had innocently poisoned herself.

A mother can have no secrets in a settler's hut but she cannot so much as break wind and all her children must hear what she has done but now she were far away from Fifteen Mile Creek and no longer could I guess her life. I were told she took laundry and perhaps she did but I am sure she only did what she must do. She had a mother and father and brothers and sisters but in the end she were a poor widow and she had 7 children and all of them was alarmed and unsettled by their lives.

In the bush he taught the knots I use to tie my blanket to my saddle Ds also the way I stand to use a carpenter's plane and the trick of catching fish with a bush fly and a strip of greenhide these things are like the dark marks made in the rings of great trees locked forever in my daily self.

I don't need new boots I got bluchers back down home. Eff the effing bluchers I'll buy you new adjectival effing elastic sided boots.

At the end of the day the fence were still not complete but my family had witnessed my new strength and they I could be the man

men in high collars who might—this

I DO NOT WISH TO GIVE THE ORDER FULL FORCE WITHOUT GIVING TIMELY WARNING BUT I AM A WID OW'S SON OUTLAWED AND MUST BE OBEYED.