# The Swan Book

- Author: [Alexis Wright](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alexis-wright.md)
- Quotes: 8
- Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/alexis-wright/the-swan-book

## Quotes

> The important public officials, passionately depicting themselves as unified people, were obsessed with imagination, narrow though it was in their minds. Well! Aesthetics was all. (p265)

> Upstairs in my brain, there lives this kind of cut snake virus in its doll's house. Little stars shining over the moonscape garden twinkle endlessly in a crisp sky. The crazy virus just sits there on the couch and keeps a good old qui vive out the window for intruders. It ignores all of the eviction notices stacked on the door. The virus thinks it is the only pure full-blood virus left in the land. Everything else is just half-caste. Worth nothing! Not even a property owner. Hell yes! it thinks, worse than the swarms of rednecks hanging around the neighborhood. Hard to believe a brain could get sucked into vomiting bad history over the beautiful sunburnt plains. Inside the doll's house the virus manufactures really dangerous ideas as arsenal, and if it sees a white flag unfurling, it fires missiles from a bazooka through the window into the flat, space, field or whatever else you want to call life. The really worrying thing about missile-launching fenestrae is what will be left standing in the end, and which splattering of truths running around in my head about a story about a swan with a bone will last on this ground. (first lines)

> People tell stories all the time: the stories they want told, where any story could be changed or warped this way or that. (p84)

> After clouds, always mist, and another ghost story to tell. (p187)

> She remembered Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions once saying that no story was worth telling if no one could remember the lesson in it. These were stories that have made no difference to anyone. Old Aunty was fading away forever. But... even true stories have to be invented sometimes to be remembered. Ah! The truth was always forgotten. (p210)

> The girl convinced herself that only the mad people in the world would tell you the truth when madness was the truth, when the truth itself was mad. (p64)

> Her mind was only a lonely mansion for the stories of extinction. (p333)

> In every neck of the woods people walked in the imagination of doomsayers and talked the language of extinction. (p5)