Quotes from Alexis Wright

That attitude that I wouldn't succeed didn't come from my family; it came from school and then the township we lived in. I wasn't going to settle for that, and my mother warned us not to settle for less, to make the most of our lives.

A goddess who had dragged herself out of the ocean then become an ordinary old woman.

So my brain is as stuffed as some old broken-down Commodore you see left in the bush.

It was very difficult, impossible really, to survive if you never existed.

People tell stories all the time: the stories they want told, where any story could be changed or warped this way or that.

But...even true stories have to be invented sometimes to be remembered.

Which way should you run to escape this world?

Were they really Aboriginal? Did they really belong to Warren Finch's ancestral country? Anthropologists, lawyers and other experts, like archeologists, sociologists and historians, were called to examine the genealogies of these people. And emergency legislation was bulldozed through parliament in the dead of night which claimed that Warren Finch was the blood relative of every Australian, which gave power to the government to decide where he was to be buried.

Men from the mountaintops will always come down to the molehill to conquer it. That will always be the vice of the conquerors.

It's not that shit happens as other people have said; it's the eternal reality of a legacy in brokenness that was the problem to them.

Am I Aboriginal, or how much of an Aboriginal am I?

How could any of the swamp people explain this comfortable face they saw on television that held a universal magic capable of mirroring the faces of countless millions of ordinary people, who like themselves, had been duped by their own sense of community into recognizing some uncanny likeness and affinity between themselves and Warren Finch?

Her mind was only a lonely mansion for the stories of extinction.

Warren's guests had learnt about poverty, not from being poor themselves, in places where you did not hear the screams and yelling of help.

They kept poking him in his bony ribs, wanting to know: Who do you reckon you are? What his name was and why he kept saying that his house had disappeared and all that. It is very hard to lose a house. Why would anyone want to do that?

He was a child, but his mind was already laden like a museum, where old and new specimens, facts and figures, lived together as evidence of his own personal history.

Like autumn leaves, bad days fell away as though the genius of the room could not retain them.

The expectation was I would get married and become a mother and settle down. We didn't have any role models. We saw teachers and doctors and nurses, but I'm not a teacher, and there was no possibility of being a doctor or a nurse. I had to work and find my own way.

I've never seen myself as a spokesperson. I've always seen myself as a worker and am very grateful for the trust that my own people have given me over the years.

My world has been quite rich in my life, and I've been happy. I've no regrets.

We have to think big. We have to imagine big, and that's part of the problem. We're letting other people imagine and lead us down what paths they want to take us. Sometimes they're very limited in the way their ideas are constructed. We need to imagine much more broadly. That's the work of a writer, and more writers should look at it.

English is my language because of the history, and what I try to do - and I did that in 'Carpentaria' in particular - is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking.

When the world changed, people were different. Towns closed, cities were boarded up, communities abandoned, their governments collapsed. They seemed to have no qualms that were obvious to you or me about walking away from what they called a useless pile of rubbish, and never looking back.

It's a really important thing for Aboriginal people to remember how stories are told and the power of stories, and make it an important feature in our world again.