John Marsden Quotes

I can't describe the feeling when I go down – it's down down down and there's never going to be an up again. And whatever was good isn't good any more; white becomes grey, music becomes dictionaries, honey becomes beer and the sky a curdled lemon. There's no caramel anymore. ~ John Marsden

There's nothing like the very early morning. It's the sweetness of the air, the sweet coolness; it's the bubbling of the creek which, for some strange reaction, always sounds more energetic than it does later on; it's the gargling of the magpies. ~ John Marsden

I feel like I'm dropping such a long way down again." "I seem to be dropping into a cold dark wet place, where no one's been before and noone can every follow. There's no future there; just a past that sometimes fools you into thinking it's the future. It's the most alone place you can ever be and, when you go there, you not only cease to exist in real life, you also cease to exist in their consciousness and in their memories. ~ John Marsden

This is bigger than a fart in a bathtub, you know. ~ John Marsden

We're all so curiously alone, but it's important to keep making signals through the glass ~ John Marsden

I make people uncomfortable. The kind ones get angry because their kindness doesn't work. The unkind ones get angry because they think I'm attacking them. ~ John Marsden

Too much thinking, not enough feeling. ~ John Marsden

We've all had to rewrite the scripts of our lives the last few weeks. We've learnt a lot and we've had to figure out what's important, what matters – what really matters. It's been quite a time. ~ John Marsden

Oh, Homer! You don't have to play dumb anymore! You're not at school now. ~ John Marsden

If I have to do battle with you a thousand times to prove my point, I'll do it.'
The queen unwisely asked, 'But to prove what point, my dear Hamlet?'
'That I loved Ophelia! Fifty thousand brothers, with all the love they can summon, would not equal my love for here. Ophelia, Ophelia. ~ John Marsden

Let's go home,' Homer said, 'to Hell. ~ John Marsden

Silence, sometimes my fortress, always my prison. ~ John Marsden

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am. ~ John Marsden

Silence, always my fortress, sometimes my prison ~ John Marsden

But somehow, standing in the clear night air, under a sky that glowed like a shower of sparks, none of that stuff mattered. It slipped off me. It was like shedding your clothes before you step in the shower. I felt I was down to essentials again. In fact I felt very close to God at that moment. I guess if you're ever going to feel close to God it'll be while you're looking at the heavens. ~ John Marsden

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. ~ John Marsden

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. ~ John Marsden

They weren't necessarily soldiers, but you didn't have to be soldiers to be affected by it all. ~ John Marsden

If people are either mountain people or ocean people then I'm a mountain person. I love the ocean, the few times I get a chance to see it, but I'm a mountain girl. ~ John Marsden

It all began when ... they're funny, those words. Everyone uses them, without thinking what they mean. When does anything begin? With everyone it begins when you're born. Or before that, when your parents got married. Or before that, when your parents were born. Or when your ancestors colonised the place. Or when humans came squishing out of the mud and slime, dropped off their flippers and fins, and started to walk. But all the same, all that aside, for what's happened to us there was quite a definite beginning ~ John Marsden

How funny are dogs? ~ John Marsden

Dying's a fearful popular activity these days so we often double 'em up. ~ John Marsden

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. ~ John Marsden

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. ~ John Marsden

Life's about a hell of a lot more than being happy. It's about feeling the full range of stuff: happiness, sadness, anger, grief, love, hate. If you try to shut one of those off, you shut them all off. I don't want to be happy. I know I won't live happily ever after. I want more than that, something richer. I want to go right up close to the beauty and the ugliness. I want to see it all, know it all, understand it all. The richness and the powerty, the joy and the cruelty, the sweetness and the sadness. That's the best way I can honour my friends who died. ~ John Marsden

I wonder if they realize how much I notice about them They probably haven't a clue because I never look at them or show the slightest interest. But I'm very aware of everything. I remember seeing an old film once where a father says to his son: "Son when your mouth's open you're not learning anything." If that's true then I'm well on the way to becoming the world's wisest woman. ~ John Marsden

The Spice Girl morality is the morality of the three-year-old. ~ John Marsden

In the midst of death we are in life ~ John Marsden

Pale as ice you passed me by;
I wondered what you really felt,
And waited through the changing times,
To see if you would one day melt.
I thought that ice would melt with warmth,
But there were thing I did not know:
The sun can touch the outer layers
But does not reach the deepest snow.
Winter sometimes seems like years,
Summer's sometimes far away,
But winter always turns to summer,
As surely as does night to day. ~ John Marsden

One of the things I find strangest and hardest is that we were having such conversations. We should have been talking about discos and electronic mail and exams and bands. How could this have been happening to us? How could we have been huddled in the dark bush, cold and hungry and terrified, talking about who we should kill? We had no preparation for this, no background, no knowledge. We didn't know if we were doing the right thing, ever. We didn't know anything. We were just ordinary teenagers, so ordinary we were boring. Overnight they'd pulled the roof off our lives. And after they'd pulled off the roof they'd come in and torn down the curtains, ripped up the furniture, burnt the house and thrown us into the night, where we'd been forced to run and hide and live like wild animals. We had no foundations, and we had no secure walls around our lives any more. We were living in a strange long nightmare, where we had to make our own rules, invent new values, stumble around blindly, hoping we weren't making too many mistakes. We clung to what we knew and what we thought was right, but all the time those things too were being stripped from us. I didn't know if we'd be left with nothing, or if we'd left with a new set of rules and attitudes and behaviours, so that we weren't able to recognise ourselves any more. We could end up as new, distorted, deformed creatures, with only a few physical resemblances to the people we once were. ~ John Marsden

I remembered Robyn telling me the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and how they'd survived: when the King chucked them in the furnace and an angel or someone went in with them. The furnace blazed all around them but they didn't burn.
And it did calm me. I don't know if it was Robyn or an angel or even God himself was in the boot, but I was starting to suspect that whenever I wanted God, he was there. Only not necessarily in the form I wanted, or doing what I wanted ... In the pitch of the black boot I clung to the image of a fiery furnace, and it wasn't the furnace or Hell either. ~ John Marsden

I refuse to think fear. I will think strong. I will think brave. ~ John Marsden

It's funny about a face, how big a difference it makes. I mean, one day you look in th mirror and you think, yeah, that's me, that's my face. And then another day ... you think, that's not me, that's not my face. So am I my face? I mean is that all I am? ~ John Marsden

Some men run out of stories, of conversation, in no time at all. Either so little has happened to them or, more likely, they are incapable of understanding or retaining what has happened to them, and so they soon find themselves with nothing to say. Such a man makes a terrible companion. ~ John Marsden

I was deeply impressed by the fact that my life could lose three days without my having any awareness of it. Maybe this was a preview of death: continuous visions and dreams and vague glimpses of reality. Only with death you never wake up: you keep having the weird images forever. ~ John Marsden

I really believe that our stories make us who we are. I don't think people are born as empty shells. They already have the makings of a personality and they have intelligence. But from the moment they're born and maybe before that they start accumulating stories and it's those stories that have the biggest effect on them. ~ John Marsden

The only real enemy humans have is death. Every other enemy like a kid who slags you off at school or a cop who pulls you over you think they're enemies but they're not really. They're just I don't know irritations. But death that's the serious one because you know he'll win eventually. And that makes you like you've got to try to beat him. The bigger the challenge the harder you try. That's true of anything. In a way our enemies aren't these soldiers themselves our enemy is death and the soldiers are just his little local representatives. -Homer ~ John Marsden

A few people would suffer, but a lot of people would be better off.'
'It's just not right,' said Kevin stubbornly.
'Maybe not. But neither's your way of looking at it. There doesn't have to be a right side and a wrong side. both sides can be right, or both sides can be wrong ... ~ John Marsden

I mean that the more confident people are about their beliefs, the more likely they are to be wrong. It's the ones who are so certain, so black and white, the ones who never consider that they could be wrong or that anyone else could be right, they're the ones who scare me. When you're not confident at least you keep checking what you do and asking yourself if you're on the right track. ~ John Marsden

I remember Robyn saying once 'Talking about yourself can be selfish or generous'. When I asked what she meant, she said: 'If you never talk about yourself, about your problems and stuff, that's selfish, because you're not giving your friends a chance to help you. And if you talk about yourself all the time, you're selfish and boring. ~ John Marsden

Action is its own kind of thinking. We had to fight now: these people were a cancer who had crept into our stomachs and infected us all. We had to be surgeons, bold and clever, not thinkers and talkers. ~ John Marsden

Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted. ~ John Marsden

He carried Hell with him, as we all did, like a little load on our backs that we hardly noticed most of the time, or like a huge great hump of suffering that bent us over with its weight. ~ John Marsden

Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission ~ John Marsden

What happened next played itself out like a terrible drama with two spectators. Lee and I stayed on our side of the fence, like an audience. Of course if the bull had wanted to smash through the fence he could have done so any time, but luckily nearly all cattle live and die without learning that. It's like school, most students go from kindergarten to Year 12 without noticing that they could do a fair amount of damage if they wanted to. They stay inside the fence. ~ John Marsden

There's no room for anything else. You forget that you're tired or cold or hungry. You forget that banged-up knee and your aching tooth. You forget the past, and you forget that there's such a thing as a future. ~ John Marsden

There's life in his face again. It occurs to me that this is the best thing I could have done, it's actually a great way to leave, because it's giving Gavin the message that we haven't been defeated, we are up for it, we're young, we're in control of our lives again, we can charge into the future with confidence. When we round the corner of the driveway I take his hand and we run down to the gate together. ~ John Marsden

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. ~ John Marsden

Chris says his father was born on the corner of straight and narrow ... ~ John Marsden

Still without looking at me, Silas responded to my question. 'He fell in love with Madame Geneva. That were the real story of his downfall, though his mother won't have it at any price.' I knew well who, or rather what, Madame Geneva was. It was one of the names people in Hell, and no doubt various other places, used for gin. Along with Hell water, strip-me-naked, bunter's tea, blue ruin and meat-drink-washing-and-lodging. And a dozen others. I had seen many men and women in love with Madame Geneva, whatever alias she went under, and she did not serve them well. ~ John Marsden

The dreams now were simply of staying alive. ~ John Marsden

We had enough years in front of us to be serious and grown-up and respectable. Why rush it? But on the other hand we always complained when teachers and other adults treated us as kids. In fact there was nothing that annoyed me more. So it was a frustrating situation. What we needed was a two-sided badge that said 'Mature' on one side and 'Childish' on the other. Then at any moment we could turn it to whatever side we felt like being and the adults could treat us accordingly. ~ John Marsden

Oh Ellie, doesn't it make your mouth water?"
"It makes me water all right," I said crudely. "But not from my mouth. ~ John Marsden

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. ~ John Marsden

The biggest risk, is to take no risks ~ John Marsden

I knew then the answer to my question; the question I'd asked myself many times during this war, and many more times since it ended. When would I be able to put the war behind me? When would I be able to forget it? And I knew now that the answer was simple.
Never. I never would. Some things end. But war never does. ~ John Marsden

We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies. ~ John Marsden

If you have blank spots instead of stories for part of your life, then that would be a pretty serious thing I think. ~ John Marsden

A bad black horse steals
Steals into my head
And moves across the landscape
Of my mind, while I sleep.
He does what he likes in there.
Next day I feel
The damage.
In the quiet mist
I watch her go.
It feels like snow.
There's a feeling that I get.
I walk back home
Sad and slow. ~ John Marsden

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. ~ John Marsden

The world was quickly forgetting us. And there was little news to report. ~ John Marsden

Never cry over anything that can't cry over you ~ John Marsden

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. ~ John Marsden

If you added up all the really significant episodes in your life they'd probably come to less than sixty minutes. ~ John Marsden

It seems like suffering's the only time we can see what's essential. If peace ever comes back I'm making a vow: I'll design myself special glasses. They'll block out whether people are fat or thin or beautiful or weird-looking, whether they have pimples or birthmarks or different coloured skin. They'll do everything suffering's done for us, but without the pain. I'm going to wear those glasses for the rest of my life. ~ John Marsden

It struck me that Lee was in many ways our true hero. Lee was the one who did the dirtiest jobs, quietly, without fuss, without going into big emotional scenes. He was so efficient, so reliable, so brave. Whenever we fell short, he made up the gap. I'm not just talking about the red hot moments, when enemy soldiers were shooting at us, when we were within a moment of death. I'm talking about the sourer times too, when we were so tired we could hardly remember to breathe, or we were so bored we'd pick at each other just for something to do, or so distressed we'd wish a soldier would come along and blow us into oblivion with an M16. At all those times Lee stood strong. He was like the Wirrawee grain silo. You could see the grain silo from miles away, tall and reliable. It stood for Wirrawee, and it gave you a safe comforting feeling to know it was there. That was how I'd felt about Lee during the war. ~ John Marsden

Light is important to us humans. It influences our moods, our perceptions, our energy levels. A face glimpsed among trees, dappled by the shadows and the green-tinged light reflected from the forest, will seem quite different to the same face seen on a beach in hard, dry, sunlight, or in a darkening room at twilight, with the shadows of a venetian blind striped across it like a convict's uniform. ~ John Marsden

People just sticking names on places, so that no one could see those places properly any more. Every time they looked at them or thought about them the the first thing they saw was a huge big sign saying 'Housing Commission' or 'private school' or 'church' or 'mosque' or 'synagogue'. They stopped looking once they saw those signs. ~ John Marsden

How strange it would now - like speaking without a voice. Is that what music is then, a ventriloquist with his doll ? ~ John Marsden

So what are violinists?
Well, I think they're really sensitive, and kind of deep. ~ John Marsden

Instead of blaming us, find your true enemy. And, where the offence is, there let the great axe fall. ~ John Marsden

Well, I've learnt this much: it doesn't matter
what it costs, it's worth paying the price. You can't live cheap
and you can't live for nothing. Pay the price and be proud you've
paid it, that's what I reckon. ~ John Marsden

This is the most complicated relationship since Romeo and Juliet," she complained. "You're
both hopeless. I mean, what is the big problem? You love him. He adores you. You get together and live happily ever after. Any
questions? No, of course not. That'll be ten dollars, thank you. ~ John Marsden

And suddenly they came out of the woodwork. I don't actually know what that expression means. What come out of the wood work? Cockroaches maybe. Mice? Are these rhetorical questions, like I just learned about on one of my rare visits to school? Was that a rhetorical question? Is it a paradox when you ask rhetorically if a rhetorical question is a rhetorical question? I think I'd better stop before I get a headache. ~ John Marsden

You can never stay angry too long in the bush though. At least, that's what I think. It's not that it's soothing or restful, because it's not. What it does for me is get inside my body, inside my blood, and take me over. I don't know that I can describe it any better than that. It takes me over and I become part of it and it becomes part of me and I'm not very important, or at least no more important than a tree or a rock or a spider abseiling down a long thread of cobweb. As I wandered around, on that hot afternoon, I didn't notice anything too amazing or beautiful or mindbogglingly spectacular. I can't actually remember noticing anything out of the ordinary: just the grey-green rocks and the olive-green leaves and the reddish soil with its teeming ants. The tattered ribbons of paperbark, the crackly dry cicada shell, the smooth furrow left in the dust by a passing snake. That's all there ever is really, most of the time. No rainforest with tropical butterflies, no palm trees or Californian redwoods, no leopards or iguanas or panda bears.

Just the bush. ~ John Marsden

We're home already. ~ John Marsden

It'd be funny if one of them was called Gavin. Funny but irrelevant. ~ John Marsden

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. ~ John Marsden

I guess you can't live at full-on intensity forever. Lying on the bed of my cell in the dark, trembling, waiting for the soldiers to come in and shoot me - you just can't keep doing that. There's something in the human spirit that won't let you live that way. ~ John Marsden

Nothing reaches inside you and grabs you by the guts the way fear does. ~ John Marsden

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. ~ John Marsden

I don't want them hanging a double murder on me. It wouldn't look good on my school record. ~ John Marsden

Why did people call it Hell? I wondered. [ ... ] No place was Hell, no place could be Hell. It's the people calling it Hell, that's the only thing that made it so. People just sticking names on places, so that no one could see those places properly anymore. [ ... ]
No, Hell wasn't anything to do with place, Hell was all to do with people. Maybe Hell was people. ~ John Marsden

I lay there with my mind running amuck, on the brink of madness. And somehow, gradually, early Sunday morning, I became calm. I can't think of any other word for it. I was thinking about the beach poem again, and I started to feel that I was being looked after, that everything was OK. It was strange: if there was ever a time in my life when I had the right to feel alone this was it. But I lost that sense of loneliness. I felt like there was a force in the room with me, not a person, but I had a sense that there was another world, another dimension, and it would be looking after me. It was like, This isn't the only world, this is just one aspect of the whole thing, don't imagine this is all there is. ~ John Marsden

To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education. ~ John Ruskin

There's a lot of craft in songwriting. The divine inspiration is when the idea comes. It may be a riff. It may be a word. It may be a phrase. It may be a title. Sometimes, in the best of both worlds, that divine inspiration extends through the whole song. I've literally sat down and written a song from beginning to end, almost complete lyrics and everything without ever stopping ... in two minutes. The chorus of 'She's Gone' was like that.. ~ John Oates

Here is a vocation that will bring you more satisfaction than if you became a millionaire ten times over: Develop the extraordinary skill for detecting the burdens of others and devote yourself daily to making them lighter. ~ John Piper

When we have communion with God in the doctrine we contend for-then shall we be garrisoned by the grace of God against all the assaults of men. ~ John Owen

Make sure you're doing something that you love, that you're willing to do for the rest of your life. If you're doing it for money, that's the only thing you won't make. ~ Daymond John

Me miserable! Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven. ~ John Milton

I could try to pretend that I didn't care anymore, but it could never be true again. You can't just make yourself matter, and then die, Alaska, because now, I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. ~ John Green

Everyone can feel the nothingness, the void, just beneath the surface of everyday routines and securities. ~ John Zerzan

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago. ~ John Updike

Western people often see obscenity where there is only symbolism. ~ Sir John Woodroffe

I want to find someone on the earth so intelligent that he welcomes opinions which he condemns. ~ John Jay Chapman

Like a bitch in heat, I seem to attract a coterie of policemen and sanitation officials. ~ John Kennedy Toole

The only care That I shall share Shall be the care of others, And on the road I'll halve the load Of overburdened brothers. I rather guess It's selfishness That drives me to such actions, For in this plan I find I can Forget my own distractions. ~ John Kendrick Bangs

In fact, five years ago, after Saddam ejected the UN inspectors, John McCain and I gave up on containment and introduced the Iraqi Liberation Act, which, when it became law, made a change of regime in Baghdad official US policy. You might therefore say that, when it comes to Iraq, President Bush is just enforcing the McCain-Lieberman policy. ~ Joe Lieberman

When the market goes to hell, it's more of an opportunity than a problem. ~ John Fredriksen

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness. ~ John Ruskin