“‘Are they changed because they want to go back to their old life, or is it because they’re so depressed at realizing their old life was no better than what we have now?’”
“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”
“I suddenly felt that it was all the same to me whether the world existed or whether there had never been anything at all: I began to feel with all my being that there was nothing existing.”
″‘The reason there’s no use looking,’ said Mr. Beaver, ‘is that we know already where he’s gone!’ Everyone stared in amazement. ‘Don’t you understand?’ said Mr. Beaver. ‘He’s gone to her, to the White Witch. He has betrayed us all.‘”
“I feel no malice toward this girl. I don’t even envy her. Watching, I am simply emptied, and in the dream I want to cry out, because she is something I can never be, some possibility in my life that can never be fulfilled.”
“He screamed something without words and flung the papers and paints into the dirty brown water… He watched them all disappear. Gradually his breath quieted, and his heart slowed from its wild pace. The ground was still muddy from the rains, but he sat down anyway. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere. Ever again. He put his head down on one knee.”
“As in large troops And multitudinous, when winter reigns, The starlings on their wings are borne abroad; So bears the tyrannous gust those evil souls. On this side and on that, above, below, It drives them: hope of rest to solace them Is none, nor e’en of milder pang.”
“These of death No hope may entertain: and their blind life So meanly passes, that all other lots They envy. Fame of them the world hath none, Nor suffers; mercy and justice scorn them both. Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by.”
“No. About… Oh hell, don’t you understand? I didn’t even realize I was talking. It’s the beginning of the end. It’s all downhill from here, and I didn’t have very far to go. But I was really hoping to hang on to my brains. I really was.”
“And I didn’t want to think about that. I didn’t want to exist inside that hopelessness. I just wanted to sink into this stolen moment with him and keep our doomed reality at bay.”
“Even when it feels . . . hopeless. Like everything is telling him to let go. This time, maybe this time, he won’t let go. He’ll just . . . hold on and he’ll keep going. He’ll keep going until he sees the sun.”
“The tragedy in his life already existed. To love an atmospheric spirit. That was the real sorrow. Hopelessness itself. Nowhere on the printed page, nowhere in the annals of man, would her name appear: no local habitation, no name. There are girls like that, he thought, and those you love most, the ones where there is no hope because it has eluded you at the very moment you close your hands around it.”
“I like Curtis Talcott a lot. Maybe I love him. Sometimes I think I do. He says he loves me. But if all I had to look forward to was marriage to him and babies and poverty that just keeps getting worse, I think I’d kill myself.”
“Sometimes...you can cry until there’s nothing wet in you. You can scream and curse to where your throat rebels and ruptures. You can pray, all you want, to whatever god you think will listen. And, still it makes no difference. It goes on, with no sign as to when it might release you. And you know that if it ever did relent...it would not be because it cared.”
“As prayer warriors, we must remember that no matter how hopeless a situation may appear to us, God gives us power in prayer to do something about it.”
Especially the scenes concerning the Websters and the wedding were hilarious, I sometimes laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes.
On the other side, the scenes concerning the De Head family were sometimes very sad and their situation had an almost hopeless feel to it, especially near the end.
“He could not play the game without hope; could no play the game without a dream. They had taken it all away from him now, they had turned away from him and there was nothing for him now. The plane gone, his family gone, all of it gone. They would not come. He was alone and there was nothing for him.”
“Next Saturday we play Wangaroo for the Peninsula Junior Colts Premiership. The whole town is talking about it, it’s the biggest thing to happen here since the second prize in the S.A. Tidy Towns Competition (Section B). Just shows what sort of town I live in. Hopeless.”
“Night followed day and day followed night over and over again. Sylvester on the hill woke up less and less often. When he was awake, he was only hopeless and unhappy.”
“His thoughts began to race like mad. He was scared and worried. Being helpless, he felt hopeless. He imagined all the possibilities, and eventually he realized that his only chance of becoming himself again was for someone to find the red pebble and to wish that the rock next to it would be a donkey.”
“Doesn’t it look as if by removing his furniture we were showing him that we have given up all hope of his getting better and are leaving him to his own devices without any consideration?”
“But Johnny has only thought in his head and that’s his beloved bicycle, he just sits there staring at it, examining it, and gauging its chances of a life after this.”
“Mam turns toward the dead ashes in the fire and sucks at the last bit of goodness in the Woodbine butt caught between the brown thumb and the burnt middle finger.”