James Vance Marshall Quotes

″‘All right, Peter,’ she whispered. ‘I’m here.’ She felt the tension ebb slowly out of him, the trembling die gradually away. When a boy is only eight a big sister of thirteen can be wonderfully comforting.”

“In the bush boy’s laughter he’d found something he liked: a lifeline he didn’t intend to lose.”

“Always she had protected Peter, had smoothed things out and made them easy for him- molly-coddled him like an anxious hen her father had once said. But how could she protect him now?”

“The three children stood looking at each other in the middle of the Australian desert. Motionless as the outcrops of granite they stared, and stared, and stared. Between them the distance was less than the spread of an outstretched arm, but more than a hundred thousand years.”

“Their lives were utterly uncomplicated because they were devoted to one purpose, dedicated in their entirety to the waging of one battle: the battle with death.”

“In her sleep she twisted and moaned; then mercifully, her mind went blank- nature’s safety valve that protects, even in dreams, those who have been shocked beyond endurance...”

“It was very different with the Aboriginal. He knew what reality was.”

“The guilt that the little boy had started to feel, melted away. At first apologetically, then whole-heartedly, he too started to laugh. The barrier of twenty thousand years vanished in the twinkling of an eye.”

“Peter was by no means perturbed. On the contrary he felt flattered; proud. He realized that the bush boy had never seen anything like him before.”

“Brother and sister were products of the highest strata of humanity’s evolution. In them the primitive had long ago been swept aside, been submerged by mechanization, been swamped by scientific development, been nullified by the standardized pattern of the white man’s way of life.”

“She stayed motionless because, deep-down, she knew she had nothing to fear.”