Quotes from Tim Winton

There's a sad feeling in a place people have just walked out of and left behind.

But I spose the women and the children was the closest. There's something about the men just stops them being able.

It's how I fill the time when nothing's happening, thinking too much, flirting with melancholy

You can hide in someone else's rage - it blinds them

The gospel of perpetual economic growth carries in its train the salvation promise of a life bigger and better for everyone. But this greater good is often mythical. The actual experience of believers rarely bear out the claims of their faith. Even so, many adherents cleave stubbornly, fearfully to orthodoxy. I guess it's what they know.

And I wish I could say I stayed up late thinking about him but the truth is I was only awake a little while. I was so tired the swag felt like a sponge that soaked me up. I went to sleep like someone disappearing from the earth, like rain sopped into dust.

There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we've created ourselves.

She wondered if you could love someone too much. If you could it wasn't fair. People didn't have a chance. Love was all you had in the end. It was like sleep, like clean water. When you fell off the world there was still love because love made the world. That's what she believed. That's how it was.

Thinks the sun shines out yer clacker.

And you can't help but worry for them, love them, want for them - those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time ad space without you.

Anything with blood in it can probably go bad. Like meat. And it's the blood that makes me worry. It carries things you don't even know you got.

It's the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, Compassion, Art, Love. All of them are pointless. But, they're what keeps life from being meaningless.

Dogs get howling all down the way. Somewhere a bicycle bell rings. Somewhere else there's a war on. Somewhere else people turn to shadows and powder in an instant and the streets turn to funnels and light in the sky with their burning. Somewhere a war is over.

He was poor and foolish and people will always have a place in their hearts for the harmless.

There was dew on the flaccid wires of the fences and magpies were strung along them like beads.

To live you gotta be hard, I know that. But nobody wants to be a deadset cunt. That's just not fucking decent.

People do change - individuals, families, nations - and the pace of transformation need not be geological.

Shanksing across that country you stick out like a rat on a birthday cake.

I meant to slip away, he said, busking it now.

It's a dangerous feeling getting noticed, being wanted. Getting seen deep and proper, it's shit hot but terrible too. It's like being took over. And your whole skin hurts like you suddenly grew two sizes in a minute.

You look great, he said. Oh, get fucked, she said, grinning.

For the first time in my life I know what I want and I have what it takes to get me there. If you never experienced that I feel sorry for you. But it wasn't always like this. I have been through fire to get here. I seen things and done things and had shit done to me you couldn't barely credit. So be happy for me. And for fucksake don't get in my way.

Keely's pulse quickened. A stab of apprehension. He was the same at any live performance, suddenly anxious for the players. So stupid; these people were professional muscicians. But the way his throat narrowed they could have all been kds at a school recital. His kids.

Don't you see it Jaxie Clackton, you are an instrument of God.' 'Oh, I said, you mad fucker. You been out under the moon too long.