Quotes from Peter Carey

Your American, you wouldn't know if you were up yourself.

Then he struck his Lucifer upon his shoes and the dreadful looking hole were thus illuminated it were airless with the sour evidence of mice who have found food and blankets and think themselves in a position to begin a family

How do you know how much to pay if you don't know what it's worth?

Descartes said that animals were automata. I have always been certain that it was the threat of torture that stopped him saying the same held true for human beings. Neither I nor Matthew had time for souls. That we were intricate chemical machines never diminished our sense of wonder, our reverence for Vermeer and for Monet, our floating bodies in the salty water, our evanescent joy before the dying of the light.

To refrigerate a clock was an extremely violent act, not one I could explain to anyone.

There are problems with the wombat, Nathan Schick said. I was interested in wombats in '29. I went up to your zoo in Sydney and looked at the wombat. The fellow said you could train them but God, Herbie, no offence... Lee-Anne... but the wombat is not star quality.

They watched the flying foxes wheel above them, like shadows of thoughts, things so indistinct they would not exist without two witnesses.

The pain from his arthritis was sewn through the fabric of his day, like a bright needle threaded with dull wire.

Then I fell in love and everything went to hell.

All Butcher's previous politeness was revealed as so much bad milk floating in a cup of welcome tea...

I knew I had been lonely, Mem, yet I had no understanding of my desolation until my skin was finally touched.

What is called gluttony in one man is a healthy appetite in someone else.

no, I thought, only what it makes you do, clawing at the trees, splintering the bark like a tomcat, the blind and violent need of it, a joy, but who would not want to be relieved of it. I pity

Joel was only twenty-six but there was about him the sense of something over-ripe and gone to seed. He was not tall, and not exactly fat. But once noticed, immediately, those large red lips, which hovered on that balancing point where sensuality becomes greed. His fleshy face was a trifle too smooth and the skin glistened like a suspect apple which had been waxed to give it extra sales appeal.

Everything we knew from life suggested that America would do what it liked ...

Sex makes a man dishonest with himself, as is well known. I feared the slippery ambiguity of false feeling, of expediency, of things not being exactly true.

Your morals are your own affair, mum. As are my own.

The murders were so ghastly you might think it peculiar that Lucinda, no matter how lonely she might be, would leave her house at all, or, accepting the peculiarity, you may wrongly attribute great courage to her when you hear she had driven, unaccompanied, through streets that were still, for the most part, unlighted. Further, she was by no means insensible to this murderer. She was informed that he was, in all likelihood, a butcher or, the press suggested, an unsuccessful apprentice.

Of course the town fed off all the sweat and labour of the miners and the poor selectors on the plains below but in those grand stone buildings they could bankrupt or hang you as they pleased.

He wished to kneel beside him and pray. It was not shyness prevented him from doing it on Southampton railway station...It was the fear of being overcome with emotion. This was his flaw, the crack in his clay, and the more dreadful for being so unexpected...

Percy Buckle looked around his little room and knew he never had to weigh a pound of flour again in his life. I can read all day. Even as a grocer he had been a bookish fellow. All his life it had been the same -- even when he was too tired to manage more than half a page of Ivanhoe in a night, even when he smelt inescapably of sprats and mackerel, he had been a member of a lending library, and a regular attendant at the Workingman's Institute.

She could see herself still blushing and he was looking at her with those big dark eyes, as if he knew. But that was a trick of his, not an intentional trick but a misleading sign. He saw nothing.It looked as if he could see everything and people always gave him credit for it.

By the way they looked at me, by their perception of me, they would make me into the creature they perceived. I would feel myself becoming a lesser thing. It is the power of men.

And then Lucinda was like an athlete who, with her body warm, has ripped a muscle and not felt it. As she cooled, she stiffened, and felt-it hurt more than you would think possible-the damage.