Quotes from Kate Grenville

The self that had laughed and raised his glass and shouted out the words with the others seemed to him now to be foolishly, dangerously, disastrously innocent.

Violence had an enlivening effect. As long as someone else was the victim it made the blood pump, gave the world an edge of glamour.

We were two sets of people inhabiting the same space, each set going about its affairs as if the other were not there.

It was a long time since whe's been young and it was unlikely that she'd ever been lovely. She stood like a man, square-on. Her breasts pushed out the old tee-shirt, but it was clear from the way she stood that she'd forgotten about breasts being sexy. Her breasts made bulges in her shirt, the same way her knees made bulges in her black track pants, that was all.

Do not believe too quickly!

By now I had learned enough about the narrowness of a woman's choices to guess that they were not all harlots, only less lucky than I had been.

I could so easily never have learned things that would stay with me now until I died: that I was complete as I was, with all my flaws and all my strengths. That I took up space in the world, and that I was entitled to that space.

What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you did not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you. His friendship with Tagaran was not a list of objects, or the words for things eaten or not eaten, thrown or not thrown. It was the slow constructing of the map of a relationship.

Until a thing was seen, could it be said to exist? And if his eye through the telescope were the one that brought a certain star into existence, did not that make him a creator?

Until you could put yourself at some point beyond your own world, looking back at it, you would never see how everything worked together.

He had seen God in the night sky long before he understood its patterns.

He hoped that all understanding might be as simple as a matter of scale. If a man had not a week, not a year, not even a lifetime—if he had millennia, aeons—all the seemingly erratic movements of heavenly bodies and earthly vicissitudes would turn out to have meaning. Some kinds of order were too vast for a human to know. But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding.

Many things in this place were bewildering, but the feel of her body was still the thing he knew best in all the world.

I could so easily never have learned things that would stay with me now until I died; that I was complete as I was, with all my flaws and all my strenghts. That I took up space in the world, and that I was entitled to that space.

But each new vexation brought the memory of the last, and the fact that it had been solved. Vexation was vexing, but idleness was like death.

But the idea was stronger than the impossibility of it. Even to recognise that longing and give voice to it was a kind of power.

Husbands adored you, too, at least at first. Being adored was something she had come to mistrust. She felt adoration to be a small and lovely-looking bomb that could blow up in your face at any time.

The pain of being unloved was pushed off to a distance where it could not touch. I became like those flat shining beetles that live in the heart of a rotten log, a creature of no dimension, able to disappear into the narrowest of cracks.

knew that this was the world I was in now, a vile dirty place where I was alone, alone, alone.

A woman can do many things, but she has to bide her time.

It was a leap into the other

had proved myself stronger than life had ever asked him to be.

But then I had unfolded too wildly, too recklessly, in the wrong place and at the wrong time and with the wrong person.

For me, being together, fellow souls joined in fear, was some comfort. For him, that was weakness. In taking his hand I was telling him what I had seen, and that was something he could not allow.