61 Quotes by Kate Grenville

Standing in the dusk watching the great yellow eye of the tram light rushing towards her, she understood why some words were worth binding in leather and handing on. In the darkest hour, all the other humans who’d known dark hours were there with you. They’d been to the dark places before you, and they were with you now.

The dragons of twentieth-century life are ignorance, incompetence, slackness and disloyalty, she said.

You were alive for such a short time and then you went back into the great silence. The only ones who didn’t vanish were the artists. While you were reading their words and looking at their pictures they were still alive, and you shared some of their life too.

Many things in this place were bewildering, but the feel of her body was still the thing he knew best in all the world.

Other people had religion to give them a connection to eternity, and good luck to them, but religion was too narrow for her, too unforgiving, too literal. Literature encompassed everything, forbade nothing, endorsed nothing. Writers, like scientists, had the greatest respect for the world as it truly was. Their job wasn’t to judge but to examine, to experiment, draft after draft, century after century.

Some kinds of order were too vast for a human to know. But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding.

It was a leap into the other.