Randolph Stow Quotes

I find that there is no speech that is not soliloquy. And yet, always, I sense an audience.

Personally, I’d sooner be a cabbage than a crackpot. Cabbages have the respect of their neighbours.

I wonder what I’m going to be when I grow up,’ Rob asked himself. ‘Well, not a film star,’ Mike said. ‘And not an all-in wrestler. Why don’t you be a drunk? You don’t need any talents for that.’ ‘It’s got to be something in your blood,’ Rob said. It was his view that all history was a matter of blood. ‘That’s a lot of bullshit,’ Mike said. ‘Hell, Australia was built by people who didn’t know who their grandparents were. You can be anything you want to be, and you ought to be what you want to be, not what your grandpa was.’ ‘Well, what are you going to be?’ Rob demanded… ‘A drunk,’ said Mike. ‘I haven’t got any talents.

eggs and curried chicken salad and double fudge brownies. That was all she was good at: eating. In the summer the Castles, the Alistairs, and the Randolphs all went to the beach together. When they were younger, they would play flashlight tag, light a bonfire, and sing Beatles songs, with Mr. Randolph playing the guitar and Penny’s voice floating above everyone else’s. But at some point Demeter had stopped feeling comfortable in a bathing suit. She wore shorts and oversized T-shirts to the beach, and she wouldn’t go in the water, wouldn’t walk with Penny to look for shells, wouldn’t throw the Frisbee with Hobby and Jake. The other three kids always tried to include Demeter, which was more humiliating, somehow, than if they’d just ignored her. They were earnest in their pursuit of her attention, but Demeter suspected this was their parents’ doing. Mr. Randolph might have offered Jake a twenty-dollar bribe to be nice to Demeter because Al Castle was an old friend. Hobby and Penny were nice to her because they felt sorry for her. Or maybe Hobby and Penny and Jake all had a bet going about who would be the one to break through Demeter’s Teflon shield. She was a game to them. In the fall there were football parties at the Alistairs’ house, during which the adults and Hobby and Jake watched the Patriots, Penny listened to music on her headphones, and Demeter dug into Zoe Alistair’s white chicken chili and topped it with a double spoonful of sour cream. In the winter there were weekends at Stowe. Al and Lynne Castle owned a condo near the mountain, and Demeter had learned to ski as a child. According to her parents, she used to careen down the black-diamond trails without a moment’s hesitation. But by the time they went to Vermont with the Alistairs and the Randolphs, Demeter refused to get on skis at all. She sat in the lodge and drank hot chocolate until the rest of the gang came clomping in after their runs, rosy-cheeked and winded. And then the ski weekends, at least, had stopped happening, because Hobby had basketball and Penny and Jake were in the school musical, which meant rehearsals night and day. Demeter thought back to all those springs, summers, falls, and winters with Hobby and Penny and Jake, and she wondered how her parents could have put her through such exquisite torture. Hobby and Penny and Jake were all exceptional children, while Demeter was seventy pounds overweight, which sank her self-esteem, which led to her getting mediocre grades when she was smart enough for A’s and killed her chances of landing the part of Rizzo in Grease, even though she was a gifted actress. Hobby was in a coma. Her mother was on the phone. She kept

It was late afternoon, and the sun laid sharp golden halo on the ridges of the dunes, glinting on the grey-green leaves of the scrub. Behind the line of dunes that closed the valley to the south, the sea was peacefully snoring. Blue shadow crept across the flat sand floor, and the air grew sharp.

He sat in class next to Graham Martin, who was a white boy and lived in the next street to the Corams. The classroom smelled of chalkdust and children and the sour ink that was brought around in earthenware bottles. It was a different smell from the smell that school had had before he went away, when he had been in First Bubs. In First Bubs the smell had been of biscuits and oranges for play lunch, mouldering bean-bags and paint-boxes and crayons. The desks had been different too, with green cloth bags on the backs of the seats for putting things in. The desks were wrought-iron and shiny wood, carved with people's names.

He came to the boundary gate, and wheeled, and dismounted. From the high land Sandalwood stretched out like a relief map: pale brown under dead barley grass, silver under dead rye grass, yellow under stubble; the folds of the bare hills marked dark green with wattle and gum. Sandalwood and young gums looked almost grey in the brown-purple hills, and the farthest hills, and the cloud shadows, and the far clumps of scrub were dark blue, and the east wind was dry as fire, and the whole huge land smelled of eucalyptus and dry grass and a harsh sweet smell like the stems of everlastings. The huge, huge land rolled out like a blanket under the world-enlarging cry of the crows, which made the screech of a snowstorm of white cockatoos in the river gums by the creek sound busy and trivial and frail.