Quotes from John Marsden

I knew I was breaking about a dozen laws but I guess I had different attitudes to stuff like that since the war. Laws were for the stupid the immature the irresponsible. The inflexible and the narrow-minded. The prejudiced. The obsessive. The lazy and careless and selfish and spoilt. The violent.

Schools in the 21st century are paying a heavy price for the errors of schools and teachers a generation ago. We are being punished for their sins.

We must give our children fear. It is a rich and immensely valuable experience to know fear. Fear in context, fear that exists in complex relationships with other forces, fear that has limits and can be contained within safe places: this is the only way people at the beginning of their life journeys can develop an arsenal powerful enough to ensure that those journeys are healthy, satisfying and successful.

It's like the future is a building you put up on the foundations of the past.

The people I knew who thought brutal thoughts and acted in brutal ways—the racists, the sexists, the bigots—never seemed to doubt themselves. They were always so sure that they were right.

Laughter's meant to be loving, wrapping itself around you like a hug, but when it's aimed at me, it seems cruel.

You can tell the staff footsteps from the patients'. The staff sound like they're going somewhere.

When I sleep, which isn't very often—even with the tablets—I get right down under the sheets, pulling them over my head. The air gets a bit stale but I feel safer, more secure, doing that. It's my white cocoon where I can be a caterpillar, a grub, never to turn into a butterfly or even a moth. It's the safest place I know. It's the only time and the only place where I can feel some peace.

Everyone keeps telling me that I shouldn't feel guilty—but it doesn't seem to help much. What you feel is what you feel.

Being brave is a choice you make. You've got to say to yourself: I'm going to think brave. I refuse to think fear or panic.

No, that's being too logical! You're my best friends! I don't want to be that logical!" Neither did I, when I thought about it. "Ok, then" I said. "All for one and one for all. Let's go. The three musketeers.

don't find people who will be a bully in love find people that will love you forever quote that i made up

This is bigger than a fart in a bathtub, you know.

I used to think heroes were brave and strong but the last look on Robyn's fave was not brave or strong, it was scared and unsure.

Oh Ellie, doesn't it make your mouth water?" "It makes me water all right," I said crudely. "But not from my mouth.

some men run out of stories, of conversation, in no time at all. Either so little has happened to them or, more likely, they are incapable of understanding or retaining what has happened to them, and so they soon find themselves with nothing to say. Such a man makes a terrible companion.

In this life of froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone. Kindness in another's trouble, Courage in your own.

Cynicism is like gastro: it goes through your whole system and makes you shitty.

People, shadows, good, bad, Heaven, Hell: all of these were names, labels, that was all. Humans had created these opposites: Nature recognised no opposites. Even life and death weren't opposites in Nature: one was merely an extension of the other.

no enemy too smart or too strong

The Spice Girl morality is the morality of the three-year-old.

I've succeeded, I guess, but sometimes maybe to succeed is to fail

I wrote it because we wanted to believe that our lives had some meaning. We wanted to know that we hadn't passed through the world unchanged, and that we hadn't left the world unchanged. We didn't want to come and go from this planet without leaving a mark.

Politicians who use 'getting tough on law and order' as an election slogan are exploiting those who were abused as children, in order to gain power for themselves.