# Quote — Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

> 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)

- Author: [Alexis Wright](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alexis-wright.md)
- Book: [The Swan Book](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alexis-wright/the-swan-book.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexis_Wright#The_Swan_Book_(2013)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/alexis-wright/the-swan-book/the-girl-convinced

## More from this book

> 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)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alexis-wright/the-swan-book/the-important-public.md)

> 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)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alexis-wright/the-swan-book/upstairs-in-my-brain.md)

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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alexis-wright/the-swan-book/people-tell-stories.md)