“Homesickness hits hardest in the middle of a crowd in a large, alien city.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from Barracuda
“In reading he found solitude. In reading he could dispel the blare of the world.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from Barracuda
“Son, always answer back when you receive an insult. Do it straight away. Even if there’s a chance there was nothing behind it, take back control, answer them back. An insult is an attack. You must counter.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from Barracuda
“I like being a faggot, mate, I like it a lot and I think being free in our middle age is what we deserve for straights making our childhood and our teenage years so cuntish.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from Barracuda
“He was going to take in, possess the whole of the world. Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi? Fuck off. He wanted more.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from Barracuda
“I want two scars, one on each of my shoulder blades.”
He shrugged in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“Two scars,” I repeated, “for where my wings used to be, where my wings were torn away from me.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from Barracuda
“I wonder if it is the same for women, whether women always feel this pain when they are fucked? Or is it only in sodomy that pain and pleasure are so linked, so inextricable?”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from Barracuda
“Being working class wasn’t about words, it could only be expressed through the body.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from Barracuda
“It’s alright,” they say, “Of course, there’s beauty there,” but they hold back; you know they have seen or heard of the ugliness and the insularity there. They have experienced the farawayness of it. I have learned to keep silent, not to berate them for their disregard of the Brits’ role in the colonial tragedy of my country.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from Barracuda
“I suppose he did – you cannot get further than Australia, can you, lad?”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from Barracuda
“He imagined forgiveness was like flying, that it made you soar. He imagined that it looked like an eagle, a silver bolt in the sky, that it was pure light.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from Barracuda
“She didn’t call people cunts anymore. Now she said she had problems with the word cunt. She said it was sexist – and if not sexist, they were racist, and if not racist, they were het-er-o-NORM-a-tive, a word he always had to spell out in his head to remember. He could never remember what it meant but he assumed it had to be bad.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from Barracuda
“It is gaol that finally reveals to me the beauty of Shakespeare, the spirit in his words, the jaw-dropping audacity of his language.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from Barracuda
“Contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style too self-conscious and ironic. Theirs was not a literature that belonged to him.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from Barracuda
Christos Tsiolkas
Born place: Melbourne, Australia
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“Where does it all begin? History has no beginnings, for everything that happens becomes the cause or pretext for what occurs afterwards, and this chain of cause and pretext stretches back to the Palaeolithic age, when the first Cain of one tribe murdered the first Abel of another. All war is fratricide, and there is therefore an infinite chain of blame that winds its circuitous route back and forth across the path and under the feet of every people and every nation, so that a people who are the victims of one time become the victimisers a generation later, and newly liberated nations resort immediately to the means of their former oppressors. The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism and religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a race, and it shamelessly and even proudly performs deeds that it would deem vile if they were done by any other.”
― Louis de Bernières, quote from Birds Without Wings
“while they read and talked together, there was opened before them the great book wherein God has written, in the language of mountain, and tree, and sky, and flower, and brook, the things that make truly wise those who pause to read.”
― Harold Bell Wright, quote from The Shepherd of the Hills
“He drew from under the table a sheet of strangely scented yellow-Chinese paper, the brushes, and slab of India ink. In cleanest, severest outline he had traced the Great Wheel with its six spokes, whose centre is the conjoined Hog, Snake, and Dove (Ignorance, Anger, and Lust), and whose compartments are all the heavens and hells, and all the chances of human life.”
― Rudyard Kipling, quote from Kim
“My clothes are native to the rug in the center of the room, which my mother has lovingly deemed the hamper.”
― Addison Moore, quote from Ethereal
“That’s all right,” says Billy. “We’re blending what we see but we aren’t allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
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