Quotes from Tim Winton

Wasted and wounded It ain't what the moon did I got what I paid for now See you tomorrow Hey Frank can I borrow A couple of bucks from you To go Waltzing Matilda Waltzing Matilda You'll go waltzing Matilda with me . . .

He'd worn himself ragged with second-guessing until his head felt like a tinful of bees.

They probably don't understand this, but it's important for me to show them that their father is a man who dances – who saves lives and carries the wounded, yes, but who also does something completely pointless and beautiful, and in this at least he should need no explanation.

Whatever it was went through me like a rifle rag. Come dawn, me date was so hot you could have lit a sparkplug off of it.

The spent shell come out the .243 shining like a bright idea.

sort of worked, our arrangement. Before I couldna seen the sense in it. But two of us getting meat and wood, two of us keeping a look out, it was more efficient that one bloke faffing about on his own. And it wasn't we had anything in common exactly but we was another human to talk to.

In the end he wore me down. Always asking. And the answer I give him is still the only one I have. What do I want? Peace. And it actually shut him up. He didn't niggle me about it. It was like he got it straight off. I don't just want quiet, neither. I want peace.

Is it the war that's done it to you? It's all war, she said. What is? I don't know. Everythin. Raisin a family, keepin yer head above water. Life. War is our natural state.

Liam Rector's "Song Years": "Change is hard and hope is violent".

Me? I belong to Jesus Christ. Like it or not. They wet you and get you. Anyway. No other bastard will have me.

And the moon is only the moon. But they're not empty things you know. The past is still in them. The force of events long gone, it lingers. These heavenly bodies and earthly forms, what are they but expressions of matters unfinished? …Mebbe lunatics are men who've remembered they're just men, not angels.

Peace, that's all I'm after.

The only end some things have is the end you give em.

jedoch spürt man auf ziemlich perverse Art, dass man dem Leben an sich ausgeliefert ist, weil es einen zwingt, zu atmen und zu atmen und zu atmen in einer endlosen Kapitulation vor der biologischen Routine, und dass das menschliche Streben nach Kontrolle ebenso viel mit der Machtergreifung über den eigenen Körper zu tun hat wie mit der Ausübung von Macht über andere.

Women aren't so keen to have them anymore, not where I come from, anyway. They've got other fish to fry, which is fair enough. But they don't realise, sometimes, what they're missing, or what they're withholding, you know? The power they have.

wash the black mud from my hands. On a light given off by the grave I kneel in the quick of the moon At the heart of a distant forest And hold in my arms a child Of water, water, water.

After all, there's no shape or image in modern culture to match that of the gun. Nothing else has its universal authority or saving promise

the ute was casting a shadow that no light was ever gonna make. A shadow doesn't search for a drain like that. Shadows don't have blowflies drowning in them.

The gun's slinky power has a special appeal to the young, the weak, the confused and the powerless. To those overlooked or spurned, access to a firearm is the spark of agency. With a gun in your hands, everything is possible. In a moment you imagine the respect it demands.

He was scarcely sixteen years of age when he left his father's home, And through Australia's sunny clime a bushranger did roam. He robbed those wealthy squatters, their stock he did destroy, And a terror to Australia was the wild Colonial boy.

But I'm not such a good judge of monsters; I don't know if the idea of a good death repels me now because it's in itself repellent, or because I no longer have the courage to seek such a thing.

You need some ambition. What big ambition did you have, apart from wantin to be a hero? Nothin. I just wanted to be a good man. That's all I want.

God is what you do, not what you believe in.

firearm would be a dark presence I can do without under my own roof. Too much sinister potential. Too much unearnt power.