Kate Grenville > Quotes

“How short a time a person had to be alive, he thought. How long to be dead.”
― Kate Grenville, The Secret River

“Anyone can be lovely, but you are rare.”
― Kate Grenville, Lilian's Story

“Everything in his life had come down to the sensation of her fingers against his. The person he was, the history he carried within himself, every joy and grief he had ever experienced, slipped way like an irrelevant garment. He was nothing but skin, speaking to another skin, and between the skins there was no need to find any words.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“What an astonishing thing, that her praise filled his heart.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“Ain't nothing in this world just for the taking...A man got to pay a fair price for taking...Matter of give a little, take a little.”
― Kate Grenville, The Secret River

“it crossed Farren's mind that although death seemed big, life was even bigger”
― Kate Grenville, The Secret River

“This place had been here long before him. It would go on sighing and breathing and being itself after he had gone, the land lapping on and on, watching, waiting, getting on with its own life.”
― Kate Grenville, The Secret River

“That was a place a person had to travel through alone. I met there a cold indifferent truth: that every person -- even a loved person, and I was not loved -- was alone. On the whole globe, there was no one but myself, and I was shaken and torn down to the merest speck of being.”
― Kate Grenville, A Room Made of Leaves

“Violence had an enlivening effect. As long as someone else was the victim it made the blood pump, gave the world an edge of glamour.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“Husbands adored you, too, at least at first.
Being adored was something she had come to mistrust.
She felt adoration to be a small and lovely-looking bomb that could blow up in your face at any time.”
― Kate Grenville, The Idea of Perfection

“Standing in the dusk watching the great yellow eye of the tram light rushing towards her, she understood why some words were worth binding in leather and handing on. In the darkest hour, all the other humans who'd known dark hours were there with you. They'd been to the dark places before you, and they were with you now.”
― Kate Grenville, One Life: My Mother's Story

“Some kinds of order were too vast for a human to know. But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“It was a long time since whe's been young and it was unlikely that she'd ever been lovely. She stood like a man, square-on. Her breasts pushed out the old tee-shirt, but it was clear from the way she stood that she'd forgotten about breasts being sexy. Her breasts made bulges in her shirt, the same way her knees made bulges in her black track pants, that was all.”
― Kate Grenville, The Idea of Perfection

“By now I had learned enough about the narrowness of a woman’s choices to guess that they were not all harlots, only less lucky than I had been.”
― Kate Grenville, A Room Made of Leaves

“The self that had laughed and raised his glass and shouted out the words with the others seemed to him now to be foolishly, dangerously, disastrously innocent.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“I could so easily never have learned things that would stay with me now until I died: that I was complete as I was, with all my flaws and all my strengths. That I took up space in the world, and that I was entitled to that space.”
― Kate Grenville, A Room Made of Leaves

“Do not believe too quickly!”
― Kate Grenville, A Room Made of Leaves

“We were two sets of people inhabiting the same space, each set going about its affairs as if the other were not there.”
― Kate Grenville, A Room Made of Leaves

“What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you did not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you. His friendship with Tagaran was not a list of objects, or the words for things eaten or not eaten, thrown or not thrown. It was the slow constructing of the map of a relationship.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“You were alive for such a short time and then you went back into the great silence. The only ones who didn't vanish were the artists. While you were reading their words and looking at their pictures they were still alive, and you shared some of their life too.”
― Kate Grenville, One Life: My Mother's Story

“Man had been given a brain that could think in numbers, and it could not be coincidence that the world was unlocked by that very tool. To understand any aspect of the cosmos was to look on the face of God: not directly, but by a species of triangulation, because to think mathematically was to feel the action of God in oneself.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“johnny-cakes”
― Kate Grenville, The Secret River

“Other people had religion to give them a connection to eternity, and good luck to them, but religion was too narrow for her, too unforgiving, too literal. Literature encompassed everything, forbade nothing, endorsed nothing. Writers, like scientists, had the greatest respect for the world as it truly was. Their job wasn't to judge but to examine, to experiment, draft after draft, century after century.”
― Kate Grenville, One Life: My Mother's Story

“Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“It was a leap into the other”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“I could so easily never have learned things that would stay with me now until I died; that I was complete as I was, with all my flaws and all my strenghts. That I took up space in the world, and that I was entitled to that space.”
― Kate Grenville, A Room Made of Leaves

“knew that this was the world I was in now, a vile dirty place where I was alone, alone, alone.”
― Kate Grenville, A Room Made of Leaves

“Many things in this place were bewildering, but the feel of her body was still the thing he knew best in all the world.”
― Kate Grenville, The Secret River

“But then I had unfolded too wildly, too recklessly, in the wrong place and at the wrong time and with the wrong person.”
― Kate Grenville, A Room Made of Leaves

“The creature that was me had crept away and left nothing more than the shell of a woman curled up on the bunk.”
― Kate Grenville, A Room Made of Leaves