103 Quotes by Tim Winton

Hunting and gathering are in my blood. But I’ve lived long enough to witness a diminution in the seas, and to notice a fragility where once I saw – or assumed – an endless bounty.

Time doesn’t click on and on at the stroke. It comes and goes in waves and folds like water; it flutters and sifts like dust, rises, billows, falls back on itself. When a wave breaks, the water is not moving. The swell has traveled great distances but only the energy is moving, not the waves. Perhaps time moves through us and not through it.

It’s impossible to imagine what Australia would be like without surfing.

It’s sadness coming on like the old days, the vast seamless hopeless weight of sadness looking for a place to rest.

The beachcomber goes looking for trouble, everything he finds is a sign of trouble. The writer is the same; without trouble he has nothing to work with, so he picks over the tide line, over the bits and pieces of people’s lives with grim fascination.

There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we’ve created ourselves.

I just sit here and tell the story as though I can’t help it. There’s always something in the day that reminds me, that sets me off all hot and guilty and scared and rambling and wistful, like I am now.

It’s terrifying to think you can remember things you shouldn’t possibly be able to. It’s like that childhood fear of having your soul slip from your body in your sleep. The darkness, those black sheets of glass sliding over you, upping the pressure, pushing you through the time and space and story.

Shanksing across that country you stick out like a rat on a birthday cake.