104 Quotes by John Marsden

"I can't describe the feeling when I go down – it's down down down and there's never going to be an up again. And whatever was good isn't good any more; white becomes grey, music becomes dictionaries, honey becomes beer and the sky a curdled lemon. There's no caramel anymore."

"... if you have blank spots instead of stories for part of your life, then that would be a pretty serious thing I think."

"I felt that my life was permanently damaged, that I could never be normal again, that the rest of my life would just be a shell."

"Some people wake up fast. Some people wake up slow. I wake up dead."

"We’ve all had to rewrite the scripts of our lives the last few weeks. We’ve learnt a lot and we’ve had to figure out what’s important, what matters – what really matters. It’s been quite a time."

"I guess you can't live at full-on intensity forever. Lying on the bed of my cell in the dark, trembling, waiting for the soldiers to come in and shoot me - you just can't keep doing that. There's something in the human spirit that won't let you live that way."

"I remember Robyn saying once ‘Talking about yourself can be selfish or generous’. When I asked what she meant, she said: ‘If you never talk about yourself, about your problems and stuff, that’s selfish, because you’re not giving your friends a chance to help you. And if you talk about yourself all the time, you’re selfish and boring."

"We survived, Ellie, we survived."

"At that age you think boys have as much personality as coat hangers and, you don't notice their looks.Then you grow up."

"They say teenagers can sleep all day. I often used to look at dogs and be amazed by the way they seemed to sleep for twenty hours a day. But I envied them too. It was the kind of lifestyle I could relate to.We didn't sleep for twenty hours, but we gave it our best shot."