Melina Marchetta citations

Page 6

“But then Froi looked back to where his work lay unfinished and it made him sad because there had been something about the touch of earth in his hands that made him feel worthwhile.”

“For she would be Queen of Lumatere.

But he would be king to her.”

“You shy, Francesca?” Javier asks me later on.

I shake my head. “Not really.” I’m just sad, I want to say. And I’m lonely.”

“He hesitated, remembering something Finnikin had said to him on their journey. That somehow, even in the worst of times, the tiniest fragments of good survive. It was the grip in which one held those fragments that counted.”

“If there was one weapon he had against these savages, it was not acknowledging their existence.”

“We're so different. You're an intellectual. I'm an idiot."
"Don't say that," I yelled. "You're not an idiot, you stupid idiot.”

“We don't even love each other.
I do a bit, you know.
You do what a bit?
You know. Like you… whatever… love you a bit.
I think I kind of love you too.”

“Phaedra looked across the water and her eyes met Lucian’s. Their needs came second. It came from the privilege of being trusted.”

“Those full of fear were the most dangerous of people.”

“I'll run one day. Run for my life. To be free and think for myself… I'll run to be emancipated.”

“I love it when you're demented like this.”

“See them together and you will feel a force that will take your breath away.”

“I live on the Jellicoe Road. Where trees make canopies over-head and where you can sit at the top of them and see forever.”

“I wasn't there that day to get on the three forty-seven to Yass", he says. "I was there to throw myself in front of it.”

“It's too late. Seventeen-year-olds don't need fathers.
Oh god. I'm thirty-four years old and I need a father. I can't even begin to think what my daughter needs.”

“He came third in the state for woodwork,”
Francesca explains. “We actually had to be proud of him for a whole week. Tough times.”

“I ran away one day. He was running in the same direction.”

“They always prided themselves on looking youthful. “Forty’s the new thirty,” they’d joke.
Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty’s the new one hundred.”

“Why do I feel like something's missing in my life without them and they don't feel the same about me?”

“you grab at any sign of hope. You grab it with both hands and breathe life into it, day after day. You do anything to keep it alive.”

“Do you want to know something about tyrants? When faced with death, they weep and they beg just like the rest of us.”

“In the end, the sum of my vices is all me.”

“There it was. Suddenly the strangeness of Quintana of Charyn's face made sense. Because it was a face meant for laughing, but it had never been given a chance. It robbed Phaedra of her breath.”

“Froi heard Zabat's voice echo over and over again throughout the gorge. Wonderful. The gods had found a way of multiplying the idiot's voice.”

“Someone had to be blamed. Someone had to die. (…) What you can't understand, you destroy.”

“Mama says that satisfaction isn't what I should search for. Respect is. Respect?
I detest that word. Probably because in this world you have to respect the wrong people for the wrong reasons.”

“You’re going to have to learn to ride a horse on your own, Phaedra', he said. 'It will make the journey faster.'

'The mule and I have an agreement.'

'The mule and you have similar traits.”

“But you pashed Jonah Griggs and he's the leader of the enemy.”

“How unladylike of you to mention such a thing.”