Trent Dalton Quotes

Maybe we'd all be much more effective communicators if we all shut up more.

I have a forgiveness weakness in me that I hate because it means I'd probably forgive the man who removed my heart with a blunt knife if he said he needed it more than me.

Do your time before it does you.

The downside is life is short and has to end. The upside is it comes with bread, wine and books.

I’m a good man,’ Slim says. ‘But I’m a bad man too. And that’s like all men, kid. We all got a bit o’ good and a bit o’ bad in us. The tricky part is learnin’ how to be good all the time and bad none of the time. Some of us get that right. Most of us don’t.

August is one year older than me but August is one year older than everybody. August is one year older than the universe.

Dormant true love, there for everybody, just waiting to be found, erupting when the thread of existence collides with chance and the eyes of two lovers meet. Boom. From what I’ve seen of it, true love is hard. Real romance has death in it. It has midnight shakes and flecks of shit across a bedsheet. True love like this dies if it has to wait for fate. True love like this asks lovers to cast aside what is meant to be and work with what is.

True love like this asks lovers to cast aside what is meant to be and work with what is.

Every day of your life has been leading up to tomorrow. But of course every day of your life led up to today.

Boy swallows past. Boy swallows himself. Boy swallows universe.

Your end is a dead blue wren.

The whole point of life is doing what’s right, not what’s easy.

Most things people say don't need to be said.

Watch my language? Watch my language? This is what really shits me, when the clandestine heroin operation truth meets the Von Trapp family values mirage we've built for ourselves.

...hugging Dad back feels like the good thing to do and my hope is to grow into a good man, so I do it.

Maybe we’d all be much more effective communicators if we all shut up more.

The sun is in me now. The sun is my heart, and all the world - the fishermen in China and the corn farmers in Mexico and the fleas on the backs of the dogs in Kathmandu - relies on the rising and falling of my full heart.

The only cure for grief is to grieve. The only cure for hurt is to hurt. Every tear is a tribute. Every tear is a memory, every memory is a treasure.

...she knew there was hardship in this true love and endurance and reward and failure and renewal and, finally, death, but never regret.

Slim’s always talking about this, the little movies within the movie of your own life. Life lived in multiple dimensions. Life lived from multiple vantage points. One moment in time – several people meeting at a circular dining table before taking their seats – but a moment with multiple points of view. In these moments time doesn’t just move forward, it can move sideways, expanding to accommodate infinite points of view, and if you add up all these vantage point moments you might have something close to eternity passing sideways within a single moment. Or something like that.

It’s about the ups and downs of life. The downside is life is short and has to end. The upside is it comes with bread, wine and books.

Don't worry. A man can have many best friends and none any more or less best than the other.

Molly knows the secret to a long walk. Never think about the destination. Just think about the air in your lungs, the motion of your arms and legs. There is a rhythm to it, and once you have found it that rhythm can tick-tock through time forever.

Love breeds love. Big or little, every gesture of love is as worthy and important as another. And maybe the small is actually not so small after all. Sometimes those little gestures are just as life-saving.

Love is commitment,' Zak says. 'I don't just mean commitment to a person, I mean commitment to making space for someone in your life and letting them grow and change inside that space and still loving them.

Ol' Bill's bein' all cagey because it's hard for blokes to admit a woman might choose death over putting up with more of their bullshit.

Butterfly short life, Yukio says. But butterfly live forever.... - he raises a single forefinger - in one day.

Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

The human heart's default state is actually kindness.

Do your time, before it does you

Time, Slim. Changes faces. Changes stories. Changes points of view.

I was thinking that true character surely is best shown in hell, that true goodness must surely be best displayed in an underworld where the very opposite is the norm, when evil is living and goodness is an indulgence, you know what I’m saying?

And what role are you playing today, Molly? Greta asks. Or are you still working on that twelve-year-old gravedigger girl who has convinced herself she's not being raised by monsters?

Don’t forget to be specific…Details. Put in all the details. The boys appreciate all that detailed daily life sh*t they don’t get anymore. If you’ve got a teacher you’re hot for, tell ‘em what her hair looks like, what her legs look like, what she eats for lunch. If she’s teaching you geometry, tell ‘em how she draws a bloody triangle on the blackboard. If you went down the shop for a bag of sweets yesterday, did you ride your pushee? Did you go by foot? Did you see a rainbow along the way? Did you buy gobstoppers or clinkers or caramels? If you had a good meat pie last week was it steak and peas or curry or mushroom and beef? You catchin’ my drift? Details.

The tilapia has been drowned in a garlic and chilli and coriander sauce, so many exposed white bones in its charred and thorny dorsal fin that they look like the ivory keys in the warped piano organ the devil plays in hell.

Sometimes when he's drinking, he gets all weepy and he'll ask me to come closer to him and he'll ask me to hug him and it feels strange to hold him close to me but it feels good too, with his face hair rubbing like sandpaper against my softer cheeks and it's strange and sad the feeling of sorrow I feel because I know he might not have actually been physically touched, except by accident, by another human for about fifteen years.

Adult men. Fucking adult men. Nutters, all of them. Can’t be trusted. Fucking sickos. Freaks. Killers. What was this man’s road to becoming Batman on a side street of inner-city Brisbane? How much good was in him? How much bad? Who was his father? What did his father do? What did his father not do? In what ways did other adult men fuck his life up?

because I listen and I remember what I listen to.

No weights of gold to measure Only scales of truth and lies For we are living treasure Under all our shimmering skies

Sometimes true love is not saying a single word. Just being there. Sometimes that's the greatest love we can bring someone. Just be quite. Just shut the fuck up and be there.

Don't fuckin' swear.

I'm not gonna kill myself. And we love him very much, which is only half as much as he loves us.

He said so many things, and I reckon all those things put together wouldn't say as much as he said when he'd wrap his arm around my shoulder.

What's with you and men being good?' 'Never met a good one, that's all,' he says. 'Adult men, Tink. Most fucked-up creatures on the planet. Don't ever trust 'em'.

The dads in those tv shows spend a great deal of time talking to their kids in their living rooms. Steven Keaton - the dad of my dreams - seems to do nothing but sit on his couch or at his kitchen table talking to his children about their myriad teenage calamities. He listens and listens to his kids and he pours glasses of orange juice and hands them to his kids as he listens some more. He tells his kids he loves them by telling his kids he loves them. Dad tells me he loves me when he forms a pistol out of this forefinger and thumb and points it at me as he farts. He tells us he loves us by showing us the tattoo we never knew he had on the inside of his bottom lip: Fuck you.

He stares into my eyes and he tries to understand me and I think he does because he breathes and that's what humans do. We breathe. And we think. But we get mad too. We get so sad and we get so mad.

Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.

The analogy might be that love is like the sun. We cannot look directly at it, but we see our world because of it, and experience its many life-sustaining functions. Essentially, the “teleological” definitions of love point to it nurturing, healing and transforming humans (and societies) into the best versions of themselves

Hearts don't turn to stone, Molly," Greta says. "But they do turn. One day your heart is filled with nothing but love and then something gets inside and mixes in with all that love and sometimes that something is black and sometimes it's cold and feels just like stone because it's heavy, and sometimes it gets so heavy you can't carry it inside you no more.

...he said the land gives you all you need if you know the right way to ask for it.

Sometimes you don’t have to say anything, you can just feel,

Love is lifting your heart up for the ones you love.

Love is a river. Love is a mountain. Love makes you a mountaineer.

Love is helping others,’ he says. ‘You see someone sad, you lift them up. Buy ’em a cup of coffee. That’s what I do. Don’t leave someone at square one.

Most things people say don’t need to be said,

She's beautiful, Graeme,' I say. 'I know,' he says, warmly and softly, gently nodding his head, more tears welling in his broken eyes. 'I don't have to see her to know that.

Love is knowing when you've come home.

And time is up. Time is undoing. Time is undone.

timing, planning, luck, belief. I reckon that’s like life.

See, that's called perspective, Eli. A bee sting smarts like a bitch until someone clubs you with a cricket bat.

Stay sweet, Eli Bell.

To burn this house down or set the world on fire. Up to you, Eli.

Never grow attached to anything you can’t instantly separate yourself from.

He turns to us at the window. ‘I always told my mum that’s the worst part about this country,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘All the fuckin’ bullies.

It’ll get good, mate. It’ll get so good you’ll forget it was even bad.

But isn't there a little white lie in all acts of forgiveness?

You're on the low side of love but that's still love all the same. Maybe you're lucky to have held a kind of love that makes you feel so low. Some folks feel no side of love at all.

Should have told you then that it's nothing but a choice. There's no past in it, there's no mums and dads and no where you came froms. It's just a choice. Good. Bad. That's all there is.

Love is the privilege of being with someone long enough that you’re gradually refining the truths that you tell each other. You feel safe enough to keep showing more and more of yourself to each other.

Slim spent a total of 36 years in Boggo Road.). ..He knows what a well-written letter means to a man inside. It means connection, humanity. It means waking up. He’s been writing letters to Boggo Road inmates for years using false names on the envelopes because the screws would never pass a letter on from Arthur “Slim” Halliday, the man who knows how to escape their red brick wall fortress, better than anyone. …

Molly nods, thinks for a moment. "Do you think Ophelia deserved a Christian burial if she took her own life?" Greta shrugs. "Poor girl wasn't thinkin' straight," she says. "That's what men can do to ya, Molly. Drive a girl bonkers; make her wanna go sleep forever in the nearest brook.

It feels like unrequited love, but it's not because of someone not loving me. It's that they're not here anymore. It's unrequited, but it's not painful in the sense that I love someone and they don't love me back. I love someone, I just can't be with him because he's not here anymore.

Because sadness is the truest emotion,” Greta says. “Happiness isn’t to be trusted. It’s a bald-faced liar. But the truth of your sadness enriches every other thing inside you, especially your joy. You shouldn’t be afraid to go to the place that makes you sad, Molly Hook. The more you go to that dark place inside you, the lighter it gets. You go there enough times, you realize that dark place is actually your sacred place. That place is all of you and the tears you take from that place are just the darkness leaking out, precious drop by precious drop. You following me?

No, your marrow, boy. You are weak-boned. Your bones are hard but your bones are not full. He nodded at August. 'Marcel Marceau's bones are hard and they are also full. Your brother possesses a strength that you will never have.' August shot a smug and knowing smile at me. 'But I've got great finger bone strength,' I said, flipping August the bird.

Darren says his mum told him a secret recently about Australians. She said this secret would make him a rich man. She said the greatest secret about Australia is the nation's inherent misery. Bich Dang laughs at the ads on telly with Paul Hogan putting another shrimp on the barbie. She said foreign visitors should rightfully be advised about what happens five hours later at that Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.

I was overjoyed two weeks later when I received 6 letter pages back from Alex. Three of which were devoted to memories of the times in Alex’s childhood when he’d been intimidated by boys in sewage tunnels and of the violence that ensued. After the passage in which Alex detailed the anatomy of the human nose and how weak it is in comparison to a swiftly butted forehead, I asked him just exactly who I had become pen pals with….

See, kid, there's all kinds of bad inside", he says. "Blokes who start good and turn bad; blokes who seem bad but aren't bad at all; and then there's the blokes who are bad in blood and bone because they're born that way. That about describes half of those screws in Boggo. They took those jobs inside because they were drawn to their own kind, all those rapists and killers and psychopaths they were pretending to help rehabilitate when all they were doing was feeding their own evil beasts that lay dormant inside the cells of their own fucked-up heads.

I too would know just how Marco Polo felt when he first ran his fingers over silk.

He can tell you how he’s feeling by the way he unscrews a Vegemite jar lid.

how the universe stole her boy and replaced him with the enigmatic A-grade alien loop

The key elements to a successful follow are distance and belief. Distance enough from the subject to remain undetected. Belief enough to convince yourself you’re not actually following the subject, even though you are. Belief means invisibility. Just another invisible stranger in a world of invisible strangers.

For you are blessed, Molly Hook. Never let a single person tell you any different.

I reckon He'd know she deserved a proper burial and the only thing she didn't deserve was some of those fellers in her life.

I reckon my mum didn't deserve some of the fellers in her life.

I liked it more when nobody believed in me. It was easier that way. Having nothing expected of you. Having no bar set to reach or fail to reach.

And she thinks about the life she could have had if she'd known how to move through this complex earth the way water always knows how to move through it.

The heart is warmed by warming the hearts of others. You only had a stone heart to give, she thinks, but she took it anyway.

Molly...Hook...change...everything,

Yukio...shoot through.

I reckon he's worth talkin about, Mol.

How do you know when a fish is going bonkers?’ ‘They start preaching about the end of the world,’ Slim chuckles.

Half these deals Lyle and Teddy are making I could make in half the time riding through the south-west Brisbane suburbs on my Mongoose BMX with the gear in my backpack. August could probably do it even faster because he rides faster than me and he’s got a ten-speed Malvern Star racer.

Il ragazzo scrive nell'aria allo stesso modo in cui il mio vecchio vicino di casa Gene Crimmins diceva che Mozart suonasse il pianoforte, come se ogni parola gli arrivasse confezionata in un pacchetto spedito da un luogo lontano dalla sua mente fervida. Non su carta e quaderno o con una macchina per scrivere, ma nell'aria, quella materia invisibile, quella sostanza legata a un atto di fede di cui non sospetteresti neppure l'esistenza se a volte non si curvasse per formare il vento e soffiarti in faccia.

Un vero amore così chiede agli amanti di mettere da parte quello che deve succedere e di darsi da fare con quello che c'è.

Lyle doesn’t believe in much, but he believes in the circumstance-shifting power of a broken nose.

Love is a necessity not a luxury.

if you’re asking Rosie O’Malley what true love is then you can be sure that it’s got something to do with the way Seamus brings a cup of tea to her halfway through her bath and doesn’t ask why she’s so quiet or why she needed the bath in the first place.

She spots a large army of green ants building a nest between two thin twig branches of a flimsy tree with floppy green leaves. "Look at this, Yukio," Molly whispers, leaning into the tree where a line of ants with amber bodies and glowing jay-coloured abdomens are carrying a white grub along a designated worker road on a branch. "They make their homes out of leaves. Some of the ants are the tough ones who will work together to haul the leaves up, and some of the ants are the clever ones who will weave the leaves together, and some of them are gluers who use that white stuff they're carrying to stick all the leaves in place. Yukio releases a brief sigh of awe. "Hmm." "See the bridge?" Molly asks. The ants had built a bridge out of their own connected bodies to create a shortcut for the gluers wanting to access a branch below them. "I wish that fella Adolf Hitler could see this," Molly whispers. "Hitler?" Yukio echoes confused. "Yeah," Molly says. "We could get Hitler and what's-his-name—Musolino—" "Mussolini," Yukio says. "Yeah! Mussolini," Molly says. "We get Hitler, Mussolini, and Winston Churchill all together and they could come and look at this ant bridge for a while. Calm themselves down a bit. Just watching some green ants working for an hour or two.

Love is a warm bowl. Love is joy and comfort and two heads resting against each other for a lifetime.

In all these years, he said, he was yet to come across a single gold nugget that brought any real happiness to the person who held it. Long coat bob said his family had found one large nugget long ago, centuries back, that resembled a human hand. And it became so coveted by members of his family that out caused fights between brother and sister, sister and mother, father and son. During one dispute an old woman struck her nephew with the gold hand. The nephew was struck dumb and his mental capacity was like a water hole that could never be more than half full after that. And the old woman was so ashamed by her actions that she begged Long Coat Bob's grandfather, the oldest living member of the family, to hide the gold away in a place where no one else could find it. And any other gold nuggets that were found from that moment on Long Coat Bob's grandfather reasoned, were best hidden away with it too.