Quotes from Kate Grenville

I felt myself to be as big as the night, free, a thing with no boundaries. The sky was infinite, the stars blazed like the exhilaration that filled me, their shifting pulses and shimmer a promise of time, space, eternity, all the things a woman never had. I was at last free to find my own size, and I was gigantic.

That was a place a person had to travel through alone. I met there a cold indifferent truth: that every person -- even a loved person, and I was not loved -- was alone. On the whole globe, there was no one but myself, and I was shaken and torn down to the merest speck of being.

The creature that was me had crept away and left nothing more than the shell of a woman curled up on the bunk.

There was an almost frightening breadth and depth and height to the place, alive with openness and the wild energy of breeze and trees and the crying gulls and the brilliant water. Alone, a speck of human in a place big enough to swallow me, I looked about with eyes that seemed open for the first time.

When a dangerous dog falls ill, who will come to help?

What he and I had made together was honest and important. But his orbit, like mine, lay elsewhere. We had been given a gift from the universe, a momentary precious conjunction. It was not meant to last, only to be valued and its lesson taken to heart.

But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding.

The dragons of twentieth-century life are ignorance, incompetence, slackness and disloyalty, she said.

few bricks short of a load,

I don't want any help, she said. I want someone to think ahead the way I have to and to do it without me having to ask.

All this, grassy paddock, cows, trees - he had thought it was Nature. But now he could see that that was ignorance, or lack of imagination. It was not Nature . It was actually property.

With no one but blacks around him, other than his own son, Thornhill saw that their skins were not black, no more than his own was white. They were simply skins, with the same pores and hairs, the same shadings of colour as his own. If black skin was all there was to see, it was amazing how quickly it became the colour that skin was.

Whatever the shadow was that lived with them, it did not belong just to him, but to her as well: it was a space they both inhabited. But it seemed there was no way to speak into that silent place. Their lives had slowly grown around it, the way the roots of a river-fig grew around a rock.

The ground was as clear and clean as Sal's own yard.

His rage swelled, sweet and simple.

Every tree, every rock seemed to be watching.

the bodies lying like so much fallen timber.

They stared at each other, their words between them like a wall.

It had no means of surviving but the thread that bound it to home.

Then they were moving again. Frank told her it was because of Benni, the nursemaid who looked after them. Benni was half Chinese, that golden skin. Her mother was ordinary Australian, was how Benni put it. That

A broken off chip of England resting on the surface of this place.

There is just this, though, lass, that I can tell you, she said. Which is, life is long. It has more corners than you can count. A woman can do many things, but she has to bide her time.

I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in 'Bearded Ladies' are a little bit experimental.