61 Quotes by Kate Grenville

Ain't nothing in this world just for the taking...A man got to pay a fair price for taking...Matter of give a little, take a little.

Until a thing was seen, could it be said to exist? And if his eye through the telescope were the one that brought a certain star into existence, did not that make him a creator?

Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation.

Every tree, every rock seemed to be watching.

What he and I had made together was honest and important. But his orbit, like mine, lay elsewhere. We had been given a gift from the universe, a momentary precious conjunction. It was not meant to last, only to be valued and its lesson taken to heart.

I could so easily never have learned things that would stay with me now until I died: that I was complete as I was, with all my flaws and all my strengths. That I took up space in the world, and that I was entitled to that space.

We were two sets of people inhabiting the same space, each set going about its affairs as if the other were not there.

Each language has its own take on the world. That's why a translation can never be absolutely exact, and therefore, when you enter another language and speak with its speakers, you become a slightly different person; you learn a different sort of world.

Australia lives with a strange contradiction - our national image of ourselves is one of the Outback, and yet nearly all us live in big cities. Move outside the coastal fringe, and Australia can feel like a foreign country.