103 Quotes by Tim Winton

I go out to the cliffs with binoculars to see whales find their way in from the southern mist and I walk here in this paddock, stubbornly, wondering at the heat each of us leaves in our wake.

People do change – individuals, families, nations – and the pace of transformation need not be geological.

And though I’ve lived to be an old man with my very own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.

During those years of travel I saw that architecture is what we console ourselves with once we’ve obliterated our natural landscapes.

Being afreaid proves you’re alive and awake.

The gospel of perpetual economic growth carries in its train the salvation promise of a life bigger and better for everyone. But this greater good is often mythical. The actual experience of believers rarely bear out the claims of their faith. Even so, many adherents cleave stubbornly, fearfully to orthodoxy. I guess it’s what they know.

Inside those waves our voices bounced back at us, deeper and larger for all the noise, like the voices of men.

Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water’s edge.

The night is full of stories. They float up like miasmas, as though the dead leave their dreams in the earth where you bury them, only to have them rise to meet you in sleep. Mostly the scenes are familiar, but sometimes everything is strange, the people unknown.