103 Quotes by Tim Winton

I invested them with a bogus nobility. To a suburban kid they seemed so special, enduring, wild and stiff-necked, in amongst the ancient rocks and gnarled trees, and while it was true enough they carried their secret places in their bodies and in their language, many simply wore their ordinary, dreary undigested pasts like rain-sodden greatcoats and lived like cripples.

I came home at dusk with my ears ringing from the quiet.

She was still glad she looked like Scully. He wasn’t pretty either, but pretty people weren’t the kind you need. Pretty people saw themselves in the mirror and were either too happy or too sad. People like Billie just shrugged and didn’t care. She didn’t want to turn into anyone pretty. Anyway, she had scars now, you only had to look.

Everything imaginable had been done or tried out there. It wasn’t the feeling you had looking out on his own land. In Australia, you looked out and saw the possible, the spaces, the maybes...

There is nowhere else I’d rather be, nothing else I would prefer to be doing. I am at the beach looking west with the continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings.

Life was something you didn’t argue with, because when it came down to it, whether you barracked for God or nothing at all, life was all there was. And death.

The desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism.

For every moment the sea is peace and relief, there is another when it shivers and stirs to become chaos. It’s just as ready to claim as it is to offer.

Liam Rector’s “Song Years”: “Change is hard and hope is violent”.