Quotes from The Secret River

Kate Grenville ·  334 pages

Rating: (14.4K votes)


“How short a time a person had to be alive, he thought. How long to be dead.”
― Kate Grenville, quote from The Secret River


“it crossed Farren's mind that although death seemed big, life was even bigger”
― Kate Grenville, quote from The Secret River


“This place had been here long before him. It would go on sighing and breathing and being itself after he had gone, the land lapping on and on, watching, waiting, getting on with its own life.”
― Kate Grenville, quote from The Secret River


“Ain't nothing in this world just for the taking...A man got to pay a fair price for taking...Matter of give a little, take a little.”
― Kate Grenville, quote from The Secret River


About the author

Kate Grenville
Born place: in Sydney, Australia
Born date October 14, 1950
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“The reason I prefer the sledgehammer to the rapier and the reason I believe in blunt, violent, confrontational forms for the presentation of my ideas is because I see that what’s happening to the lives of people is not rapierlike, it is not gentle, it is not subtle. It is direct, hard and violent. The slow violence of poverty, the slow violence of untreated disease. Of unemployment, hunger, discrimination. This isn’t the violence of some guy opening fire with an Uzi in a McDonald’s and forty people are dead. The real violence that goes on every day, unheard, unreported, over and over, multiplied a millionfold.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words


“I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.”
― Jack Gilbert, quote from The Great Fires


“That's the thing about freewill: Every decision we make is a choice against something as much as it is for something else.”
― Rebecca Serle, quote from When You Were Mine


“I'm not the head of Scotland Yard," said Mrs. Oliver, retreating from dangerous ground. "I'm a private individual -"

"Oh, you're not that," said Rhoda, confusedly complimentary.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Cards on the Table


“Americans tended to think of war as something that had to be done from time to time, for a particular purpose or goal. They fought not for the sake of fighting but for the sake of winning.”
― David Hackett Fischer, quote from Washington's Crossing


Interesting books

The Hired Man
(1.6K)
The Hired Man
by Aminatta Forna
A Gathering Light
(33.5K)
A Gathering Light
by Jennifer Donnelly
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 1
(4.8K)
The Gulag Archipelag...
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
All Through the Night
(5.5K)
All Through the Nigh...
by Suzanne Brockmann
Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
(3K)
Justine, Philosophy...
by Marquis de Sade
Hush
(4.8K)
Hush
by Anne Frasier

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.