Brendan Cowell > Quotes

“We were the wrong age for love and yet it was all we could think about.”
― Brendan Cowell, How It Feels

“Because it was all I wanted to fucking know. It was all I wanted to know in this fucking world: where did the beautiful boys go? Where did the beautiful boys go? Where the hell did they go?”
― Brendan Cowell, How It Feels

“I loved everything about her, and I didn't care how dark she got. If anything it was what I loved the most, the veil of pain that fell across her face most of the day, and all of the night.”
― Brendan Cowell, How It Feels

“It is easy to jump out of the village, move to the cities, and spend your time poking fun at the little places we hail from and their routine ways, but deep down inside you know that's where the real people are, the truly decent souls, and you fight and fight to deny it, until you need them so bad it hurts." p.223

Brendan..... I get it!”
― Brendan Cowell, How It Feels

“Where did my friend go? Was there a place they all gathered, the lost and self destructive? Was there a room they put them in? Necks burnt with rope or holes in their skulls. Beach-water bloated. I will know this at the end of my conversation with life. I will speak and laugh until my tongue falls out and then I will know this. I will know because he will tell me when I see him. How will I enter the theatre? With a hole in my head or exploded by sea. Wrists.”
― Brendan Cowell, How It Feels

“But those eyes, those big green eyes of hers, they bore right into me with crippling force. She wanted it too much; the space Tommy had left in her, she wanted me to fill it. And I couldn't. She looked too young and too scared. almost like she didn't really want it either, she just needed it. I couldn't stick it in and fuck her pain away. I did not know how to fuck at all, let alone as therapy.”
― Brendan Cowell, How It Feels

“I had no idea how free we were. That's how free I was.”
― Brendan Cowell, How It Feels

“What magic scale childhood does make of raw reality.”
― Brendan Cowell, How It Feels

“All the tiny things made this mammoth union up, all the times he had picked her up from Sutherland station, made her chicken salad rolls and brought her a Lipton's iced tea, called her about Sunday and fixed Nina's shed door hinge, held her and not fucked her when she was dying with period pain, thought of what she said last night and made something of it the following afternoon, all these unspectacular deposits of love he had made and they were the currency, earning enough to have her see that he was nothing but the right one.”
― Brendan Cowell

“Family and friends, as a notion, were a warped insinuation of a living death, and beleiving this had lead me here, to face a life without it.”
― Brendan Cowell, How It Feels

“On the way up Telopea Avenue she picked a rose off a tree and asked me why I didn't think to pick it off and give it to her.
'I simply didn't notice the plant,' I said.
She picked the petals off the thing as we walked, leaving a melodramatic trail of broken romance behind us.”
― Brendan Cowell, How It Feels

“But like my mum told me: 'If nothing needs to be said, then don't say anything.' And I didn't. Until I met her, and all of a sudden I couldn't shut up about things. It was like we had both been half-asleep for ages, then woken up by the other and those magical little hummingbirds of love.”
― Brendan Cowell

“Limitless honesty and insight jetting out of my skull down my veins into the keyboard and away. I unraveled all the entrails of my fears and movements, my dream-life and my life-life, and she replied with such detail and compassion I simply could not tell her enough.”
― Brendan Cowell, How It Feels