Michelle de Kretser > Quotes

“the twentieth century was best represented by an unwilling traveler. “I mean, think of the millions of soldiers mobilized by wars. And all the people made homeless because of them. Now the world is full of people who don’t belong where they end up and long for the places where they did.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel

“George moved from one group of people he didn’t know to another, trying to get out of the draught. The girls didn’t seem to notice it. They were Sydney girls, with short skirts and long, bare arms. Recently, George had gone to an opening at a gallery in the company of a visiting lecturer from Berlin. The artist was fashionable, and the gallery’s three rooms were packed. Over dinner, the German woman expressed mild astonishment at the number of sex workers who had attended the opening. ‘Is this typical in Australia?’ she asked. George had to explain that she had misunderstood the significance of shouty make-up, tiny, shiny dresses and jewels so large they looked fake.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“people suffer much more from the promises they don’t make than the ones they can’t keep”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“We believe the explanation we hear last. It's one of the ways in which narrative influences our perception of truth. We crave finality, and end to interpretation, not seeing that this too, the tying up of all loose ends in the last chapter, is only a storytelling ruse. The device runs contrary to experience, wouldn't you say? Time never simplifies - it unravels and complicates. Guilty parties show up everywhere. The plot does nothing but thicken.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Hamilton Case

“The past was not always past enough here. It was like living in a house acquired for its clean angles and gleaming appliances, and discovering a bricked-up foor at which, faint but insistent, the sound of knocking could be heard.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Lost Dog

“She was a solitary, studious girl, whose life had taken place in books; at least four years of it had passed in the eighteenth century.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Springtime: A Ghost Story

“It was one of those golden July afternoons stolen from spring, and they sat outside in T-shirts drinking beer.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“Tourists see invisible things. Sometimes their point of view eluded him. By now, he was often the first in the group to raise his camera: to a roadside shrine or a sunset, to a buffalo plowing a paddy, ribs curved like a boat. But why were the others laughing at a billboard advertising Perlwite soap? What was fascinating about two village women grinding chilies on a stone? The dust of familiarity still lay in patches on the scenes through which he moved.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel

“In the pub in Clerkenwell, it tickled Englishmen to ask, “Do you know the difference between Australia and yoghurt?” Or rather: Orstraylia and yogurt. They were hilarious, spluttering into their warm beer. There was another kind of man, whose methods were more refined. At parties, he would stand between Laura and the door asking, Which is your favorite Tarkovsky? Have you read Discipline and Punish? Whom do you rate more highly, Borges or Kundera? At confessional moments, angry names broke from him: Bellow, Roth. His brow might as well have been stamped “Frightened Early & Often.” Laura dressed him in a clean shirt rolled up at the elbows and placed him behind a desk in a room with no shadows. The luckless, passing one by one before him, wept hot, useless tears over their cancelled lives: they had mispronounced Coetzee or chosen Warhol over Duchamp.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel

“Predictably, the national broadcaster—a viper’s nest of socialists, tree-huggers and ugly, barren females—had seized on the survey, exhuming one of its bleeding-heart ideologues to moan about funding cuts to education.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“All the while, she understood that nothing could save her from the emptiness of the years that still had to be lived. Days passed, and weeks, and no one said her name.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“Be the one to break up. Be the one. Be the cool one.’ ‘Who will write the history of tears?”
― Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

“In Rome, Matt had told her, ‘I knew that if I kept up my playing, we would have a baby.’ That was what music represented to him now: a bargain he had sought with fate. In a less anaemic age, he would have sacrificed virgins or immaculate lambs.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“George noticed her feet again. They were nuggety and rectangular, like a young child’s feet—even the sparkly turquoise nail polish belonged to a child. He wondered if Pippa bothered with right and left shoes.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“Wherever Freda Hobson went, she made herself indispensable to a woman she had selected. Men admired her, at first. Very young, she had abstracted the pattern of her parents’ marriage—the blade and the block—and rolled it into a tube through which to view the world. She had collected twenty or thirty close female friends, whose birthdays were noted in a book. Freda neither quarreled nor abandoned, but with each new friend something would happen to make her feel tremendously let down.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel

“I’ve never stopped expecting my mother to call me. Sometimes a kind mirror shows me her face. I find myself thinking back through her, just as the Woolfmother predicted I would.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

“Many years had to pass before I'd realise that life isn't about wishes coming true but about the slow revelation of what we really wished.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

“away is hard to go, but no one asked me to stay”
― Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel

“The man behind the counter was as elongated and flat as if he had passed under a roller. Wrapped in the dusty smell of lentils, he was anomalous among the spices and Bollywood DVDs, having clad his two dimensions in a bureaucrat's pressed trousers and pinstriped shirt.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“Compassion struggled in Maud; uselessly, like a puppy in a sack.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Hamilton Case

“She had almost reached the cafe before Céleste identified Pippa, imposterish without beret and lampshade dress, her iPod shining through her pocket. At the time, it was merely something else unexpected, an element of the mildly extraordinary evening. But long after the open windows and the tiny running children had vanished, that memory of Pippa would persist. She made her way towards Céleste like a citizen of the future, her heart rectangular and glowing in the dusk.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“Shaz was celebrating her birthday with a women-only lunch. Obviously the occasion called for mauling our mothers, tearing into them with our pointy teeth. As daughters, it was our duty and our fate to disappoint them, we agreed, and we swore we’d go on doing so. We howled and howled, and tears ran down our cheeks.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

“The airless corridors of the English department smelled of photocopier and fear. Students were milling about a noticeboard, sniggering at a hand-drawn cartoon strip with three frames: 1. Happy student arrives at university clutching a teddy bear labelled ‘Literature’. 2. Snarling tutor in a T-shirt labelled ‘Theory’ rips teddy to pieces. 3. Student sobs.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

“Like so much that is true, it was of no help at all.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“With the revelation that arrived when the turned page showed the altarpiece at Isenheim, Laura didn’t presume to compare. A sentence was often in her mind: An eye is not a photocopier. It kept bobbing to the surface of her thoughts that year: a corpse insufficiently weighted.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel

“He had been a shy, affectionate child to whom Céleste fed Milo straight from the tin. Sometimes she tortured him, singing, ‘Dominiquenique-nique…’ while slitting her eyes until his chin shook.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“The light, now down to its grotty underwear, was cinematically sad.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“Wanderlust, on which the Wayfarer fed, was only lust, after all, lustily excited by penetration and veils.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel

“There were mortuary-white tiles on the floor, and the lights were fluorescent tubes that looked as if they would be fatal to insects.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“the restaurant where he drinks too much schnapps on his last night in the Alps.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice