John Marsden citations

“Some people wake up drowsy. Some people wake up energized. I wake up dead.”

“The only true test of friendship is the time your friend spends on you.”

“Life's harder, the deeper you feel things, was all I could think as I put the books away. Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.”

“We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.”

“All these words, words like 'evil' and 'vicious', they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.”

“What's the Future? It's a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren't the lines we wanted.”

“The Bible just said ‘Thou shalt not kill’, then told hundreds of stories of people killing each other and becoming heroes, like David with Goliath.”

“I live in the light,
But carry my dark with me.”

“There are some things that once you've lost, you never get back. Innocence is one. Love is another. I guess childhood is a third.”

“We believed we were safe. That was the big fantasy.”

“I'm a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that's me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I'd die; I don't know what of, I just knew I'd die.”

“Sometimes I think I'd rather be frightened than bored. At least when you're frightened you know you're alive.”

“We'd thought that we were among the first humans to invade this basin, but humans had invaded everything, everywhere. They didn't have to walk into a place to invade it.”

“When you're scared you can either give in to the panic and let your mind fall apart, or you can take charge of your mind and think brave.”

“Never cry over anything that can't cry over you”

“At that age you think boys have as much personality as coat hangers and, you don't notice their looks.
Then you grow up.”

“Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.”

“Nothing reaches inside you and grabs you by the guts the way fear does.”

“My survival was up to me. I had nothing and I had no one. What I did have, I told myself, was my mind, my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. These were important and powerful things.”

“Life's harder, the deeper you feel things.”

“Name three types of olives."

"Olives! I wouldn't know one type!"

"Well, there are three. You can get green ones, you can get black ones, or you can get stuffed.”

“But it was my parents I longed for mostly. I wanted to be a little girl again and cuddle into them, wriggling in between them like I'd done in their bed when I was three or four, snug and warm in the safest place in the world.

Instead I had Hell.”

“It's good to keep changing your mind. It shows you're thinking. I'll only stop changing my mind when I'm dead. And maybe not even then.”

“How funny are dogs?”

“My pen.’ Funny, I wrote that without noticing. ‘The torch’, ‘the paper’, but ‘my pen’. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It’s about the most important thing I own.”