Mary (Walkabout) 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.”

“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.”

“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...”

“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.”