“A frog! A little, green, tree frog. A beautiful little girragundji. ‘Where did you come from?’ I’m breathing again. I’m gonna live. ‘Where you come from, little fulla?’ Maybe them old people did hear me. Maybe the rain pouring down and the water coming up under our house scared this little one.”
I used to stand about the churchyard on Sunday evenings when night was falling, comparing my own perspective with the windy marsh view, and making out some likeness between them by thinking how flat and low both were, and how on both there came an unknown way and a dark mist and then the sea.
Cohn: “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”
Jake: “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.”
“Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”
“I want to look like a good person. I want to feel like I’m a good person because I believe I am. But being in here with these guys makes it hard to think about yourself being different. We look about the same, and though I’m younger than they are, it’s hard not to notice that we are all pretty young.”