“I'm a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that's me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I'd die; I don't know what of, I just knew I'd die.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“Sometimes I think I'd rather be frightened than bored. At least when you're frightened you know you're alive.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“Nothing reaches inside you and grabs you by the guts the way fear does.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“My survival was up to me. I had nothing and I had no one. What I did have, I told myself, was my mind, my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. These were important and powerful things.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“I didn't confess how wrecked I was. Let them keep thinking I was Superwoman if they wanted. I knew the truth.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“Oh, Homer! You don't have to play dumb anymore! You're not at school now.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“There's no room for anything else. You forget that you're tired or cold or hungry. You forget that banged-up knee and your aching tooth. You forget the past, and you forget that there's such a thing as a future.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“I lay there with my mind running amuck, on the brink of madness. And somehow, gradually, early Sunday morning, I became calm. I can't think of any other word for it. I was thinking about the beach poem again, and I started to feel that I was being looked after, that everything was OK. It was strange: if there was ever a time in my life when I had the right to feel alone this was it. But I lost that sense of loneliness. I felt like there was a force in the room with me, not a person, but I had a sense that there was another world, another dimension, and it would be looking after me. It was like, "This isn't the only world, this is just one aspect of the whole thing, don't imagine this is all there is.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“Sometimes I got worried that my memory was falling apart.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“The dreams now were simply of staying alive.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“We weren't creatures from another planet. We were creatures from Hell.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“They weren't necessarily soldiers, but you didn't have to be soldiers to be affected by it all.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“I was deeply impressed by the fact that my life could lose three days without my having any awareness of it. Maybe this was a preview of death: continuous visions and dreams and vague glimpses of reality. Only with death you never wake up: you keep having the weird images forever.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“I guess you can't live at full-on intensity forever. Lying on the bed of my cell in the dark, trembling, waiting for the soldiers to come in and shoot me - you just can't keep doing that. There's something in the human spirit that won't let you live that way.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“I refuse to think fear. I will think strong. I will think brave.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“This is bigger than a fart in a bathtub, you know.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
“Oh Ellie, doesn’t it make your mouth water?"
"It makes me water all right," I said crudely. "But not from my mouth.”
― John Marsden, quote from A Killing Frost
John Marsden
Born place: in Australia
Born date September 27, 1950
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“Jim watched them eat, his eyes fixed on every morsel that entered their mouth. When the oldest of the four soldiers had finished he scraped some burnt rice and fish scales from the side of the cooking pot. A first-class private of some forty years, with slow, careful hands, he beckoned Jim forward and handed him his mess tin. As they smoked their cigarettes the Japanese smiled to themselves, watching Jim devour the shreds of fatty rice. It was his first hot food since he had left he hospital, and the heat and greasy flavour stung his gums. Tears swam in his eyes. The Japanese soldier who had taken pity on Jim, recognising that this small boy was starving, began to laugh good-naturedly, and pulled the rubber plug from his metal water-bottle. Jim drank the clear, chlorine-flavoured liquid, so unlike the stagnant water in the taps of the Columbia Road. He choked, carefully swallowed his vomit, and tittered into his hands, grinning at the Japanese. Soon they were all laughing together, sitting back in the deep grass beside the drained swimming-pool.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Empire of the Sun
“But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric - not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn't storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football.You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?”
― Chad Harbach, quote from The Art of Fielding
“Solitude led to retrospective thinking, and if the past is what you are trying to get away from, then constant distractions in the present are needed.”
― quote from The Elephant Tree
“You’re not just any girl. You’re my girl.”
― Samantha Towle, quote from The Mighty Storm
“McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.
Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”
― Hunter S. Thompson, quote from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
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American Sniper: The...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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