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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“Everyone knows there are two types of mirrors, merciless and kind. The one over my bathroom sink was merciless, and I tried never to catch sight of myself in it.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

“At its best, my playing was confident and free of mistakes. That was always enough to earn me a Distinction, scraping through with a mark or two to spare. When I’d been playing for a few years, my teacher entered me for a music theory exam.”
― Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

“I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind & my eyes, refusing to be stamped & stereotyped.”
― 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

“At their first meeting, she handed George a reading list made up of French and German philosophers. When George settled down to read these texts, he discovered something astonishing: the meaning of each word was clear and the meaning of sentences baffled. Insignificant yet crucial words like 'however' and 'which'- words whose meaning was surely beyond dispute - had been deployed in ways that made no sense.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“Four years in, she had discovered the gallery when a hailstorm chased her off the street. The door stuck - it still did - and was set back from the street between two shops that sold vintage clothing. Glenice climbed the stairs and went in. A grey-faced man peered out around a curtain at the far end of the room. He nodded, and returned to his heater and his laptop. He knew Glenice of old: she wouldn't buy, steal or vandalise anything, and he had no interest in her. His lumpy black cat strolled out, inspected Glenice, tested the patch of light that the window threw on the floor and stalked back into the office.
Quite often there was something here for Glenice. Today it was a room with a table, a vase, a dish of fruit and part of a window. The hungry blue of the window frame clashed perfectly with the blue of the tablecloth without taking it over. The vase held flowers, mauve, pinky yellow, pale red, blackish - Glenice tried and failed to call up the names of black flowers. The wall was a quiet, mortal sort of pink, and there were sleepy-looking pears slumped on a green dish. It looked to Glenice like the kind of room in which someone had gradually recovered from a long illness. She stared at the painting until her feet died from the cold and then she left.”
― Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come

“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