Circular Quay Quotes

As she stood on the deck of the ferry at Circular Quay, Evie was conscious of storing up things for future recollection. Here was the lustily gleaming harbour, the absurdly golden midday, and the bridge, swinging away like a door on brass hinges as the ferry executed a slow turn. Above was an infinity of blue-becoming-black reaching far into space, almost shocking after the grey security of Melbourne. The scale of things was all wrong, too lavish, too sunny, too geared to applause. Nevertheless.

After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists,

Life cannot offer many places finer to stand at eight-thirty on a summery weekday morning than Circular Quay in Sydney. To begin with, it presents one of the world’s great views. To the right, almost painfully brilliant in the sunshine, stands the famous Opera House with its jaunty, severely angular roof. To the left, the stupendous and noble Harbour Bridge. Across the water, shiny and beckoning, is Luna Park, a Coney Island–style amusement park with a maniacally grinning head for an entrance. (It’s been closed for many years, but some heroic soul keeps it spruce and gleaming.) Before you the spangly water is crowded with the harbor’s stout and old-fashioned ferries, looking for all the world as if they have been plucked from the pages of a 1940s children’s book with a title like Thomas the Tugboat, disgorging streams of tanned and lightly dressed office workers to fill the glass and concrete towers that loom behind.

And as our ship pulled into Circular Quay I looked at the place where me legs used to be. And thank Christ there was nobody waiting for me To grieve and to mourn and to pity.