Tim Winton

She was sick of conversations with people passing through. Nothing you said to each other mattered a damn because you'd never see them again.

It's a survival thing, making yourself a small target.

Though it seemed so beautiful, the world around us was eternally dangerous. The price of spiritual freedom, we learnt, was eternal vigilance. Such a high price for so long.

"All the big things hurt, the things you remember. If it doesn't hurt it's not important."

The past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.

And you know someone's special when you never get enough of them.

Honestly, sometimes you'd rather be a dog. A mutt doesn't torture itself with thinking.

Nanna was the first dead person I ever saw. Her hair was blue against the pillow. And when me hand bumped her cheek she was cold and heavy and a kind of spark went through me, like a terrible familiar feeling. And I understood it then. She was meat. That's what dead things are.

I shoulda been making proper plans to go right then. But I wasn't. You ever seen a chased rabbit give in running? When he just pulls up and stands there? Like he's out of puff and out of ideas and can't put two moves together anymore? Well that was me. I shoulda been gone already. It was like I was paralysed.

Thing is, I'm not the surrendering type. Anyway I'm looking up and down that track. It was the highway or the wildywoods. That was the decision. Between something that's real and something you hope is real. I was banking everything on this call and maybe I wasn't fully right in the head by then but I went east. Roll the dice, that's me.

"Our stories. We store them where moth and rust destroy. We're precious about them, no? Not because we treasure them at all, but because it's safer to hold them close. Am I reading you right? Do we have that much in common?"

"Sometimes it's a mighty struggle to know what's real and what's just . . . a mirage. You understand?"

"Yeah," I said.