Quotes from The Dead of Night

“We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“What's the Future? It's a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren't the lines we wanted.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“I live in the light,
But carry my dark with me.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“Life's harder, the deeper you feel things, was all I could think as I put the books away. Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“When you're scared you can either give in to the panic and let your mind fall apart, or you can take charge of your mind and think brave.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“Life's harder, the deeper you feel things.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“My pen.’ Funny, I wrote that without noticing. ‘The torch’, ‘the paper’, but ‘my pen’. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It’s about the most important thing I own.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“Let no stranger intrude here, no invader trespass. This was ours, and this we would defend.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“The world was quickly forgetting us. And there was little news to report.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“One of the things I find strangest and hardest is that we were having such conversations. We should have been talking about discos and electronic mail and exams and bands. How could this have been happening to us? How could we have been huddled in the dark bush, cold and hungry and terrified, talking about who we should kill? We had no preparation for this, no background, no knowledge. We didn’t know if we were doing the right thing, ever. We didn’t know anything. We were just ordinary teenagers, so ordinary we were boring. Overnight they’d pulled the roof off our lives. And after they’d pulled off the roof they’d come in and torn down the curtains, ripped up the furniture, burnt the house and thrown us into the night, where we’d been forced to run and hide and live like wild animals. We had no foundations, and we had no secure walls around our lives any more. We were living in a strange long nightmare, where we had to make our own rules, invent new values, stumble around blindly, hoping we weren’t making too many mistakes. We clung to what we knew and what we thought was right, but all the time those things too were being stripped from us. I didn’t know if we’d be left with nothing, or if we’d left with a new set of rules and attitudes and behaviours, so that we weren’t able to recognise ourselves any more. We could end up as new, distorted, deformed creatures, with only a few physical resemblances to the people we once were.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“A bad black horse steals
Steals into my head
And moves across the landscape
Of my mind, while I sleep.
He does what he likes in there.
Next day I feel
The damage.

In the quiet mist
I watch her go.
It feels like snow.
There's a feeling that I get.
I walk back home
Sad and slow.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“It was the world-without-adults daydream. In my dream I'd never quite figured out where the adults went but we kids were free to roam, to help ourselves to anything we wanted. We'd pick up a Merc from a showroom when we wanted wheels, and when it ran out of petrol we'd get another one. We'd change cars the way I change socks. We'd sleep in different mansions every night, going to new houses instead of putting new sheets on the beds. Life would be one long party.

Yes, that had been the dream.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“Night started to fall, then it fell, till it was lying all over the ground.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“Being brave is a choice you make. You've got to say to yourself: I'm going to think brave. I refuse to think fear or panic.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

“Death comes walking across the countryside swinging that scythe, and he might get you or he might not.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night

About the author

Popular quotes

“Over the last few hours I've allowed myself to feel defeated, and just like she said if you allow yourself to feel the way you really feel, maybe you won't be afraid of that feeling anymore.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Death: The High Cost of Living Collected

“The weight of his losses finally too much to bear.

But not before he has known the unforgiving light of the equator, a love that exists only in his imagination, and the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Last Time They Met

“Its a perfectly good face, Sparhawk."
"It covers the front of my head. What else can you expect from a face?”
― David Eddings, quote from The Diamond Throne

“澳洲毕业证澳洲学历文凭原版制作Q/微981497266办理UC毕业证堪培拉大学毕业证成绩单真实学历学位认证University of Canberra澳洲毕业证澳洲学历文凭原版制作Q/微981497266办理UC毕业证堪培拉大学毕业证成绩单真实学历学位认证University of Canberra澳洲毕业证澳洲学历文凭原版制作Q/微981497266办理UC毕业证堪培拉大学毕业证成绩单真实学历学位认证University of Canberra澳洲毕业证澳洲学历文凭原版制作Q/微981497266办理UC毕业证堪培拉大学毕业证成绩单真实学历学位认证University of Canberra澳洲毕业证澳洲学历文凭原版制作Q/微981497266办理UC毕业证堪培拉大学毕业证成绩单真实学历学位认证University of Canberra澳洲毕业证澳洲学历文凭原版制作Q/微981497266办理UC毕业证堪培拉大学毕业证成绩单真实学历学位认证University of Canberra澳洲毕业证澳洲学历文凭原版制作Q/微981497266办理UC毕业证堪培拉大学毕业证成绩单真实学历学位认证University of Canberra澳洲毕业证澳洲学历文凭原版制作Q/微981497266办理UC毕业证堪培拉大学毕业证成绩单真实学历学位认证University of Canberra澳洲毕业证澳洲学历文凭原版制作Q/微981497266办理UC毕业证堪培拉大学毕业证成绩单真实学历学位认证University of Canberra澳洲毕业证澳洲学历文凭原版制作Q/微981497266办理UC毕业证堪培拉大学毕业证成绩单真实学历学位认证University of Canberra”
― Jeff Kinney, quote from Hard Luck

“Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned”
― Daron Acemoğlu, quote from Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.