Cloudstreet

Oriel looked at the potatoes in her hand and thought of the things she'd like to tell the spud growers of Australia about taking a little time, a little pride and a little care.

Why was it that he didn't know a thing about the underlying nature of people, the shadows and shifts, the hungers and hopes that caused them to do the things they did?

"It does you good to be tenants. It reminds you of your own true position in the world."

"Ambition, Rose. It squeezes us into corners and turns out ugly shapes."

Sam followed [his father], loved him, listened to him talk. He believed deeply in luck, the old man, though he was careful never to say the word. He called it the shifty shadow of God. All his life he paid close attention to the movements of that shadow. He taught Sam to see it passing, feel it hovering, because he said it was those shifts that governed a man's life and it always paid to be ahead of the play. If the chill of its shade felt good, you went out to meet it like a droughted farmer goes out, arms wide, to greet the raincloud, but if you got that sick, queer feeling in your belly, you had to stay put and do nothing but breathe and there was a good chance it would pass you by. It was as though luck made choices, that it could think. If you greeted it, it came to you; if you shunned it, it backed away.

Sometimes she couldn't think what jerrybuilt frame was holding her together. It wasn't willpower anymore. She'd gone past that lately. She only had will enough to make everything else work, these days. There was never enough left for her. She was like that blessed truck of Lester's, running on an empty sump.

She held the needle to the light. It was a wonder how something sharp came down to nothing like that. She looked through the needle's eye. So that's the Kingdom of Heaven, she thought. So that's all there was.

"You've got mean, Oriel."

She sniffs.

"It is the war that's done it to you?"

"It's all war," she said.

"What is?"

"I don't know. Everythin. Raisin a family, keepin yer head above water. Life. War is our natural state."

"Well, struggle maybe," said Lester.

"No, no, it's war."

"I only believe in one thing, Les," Sam solemnly uttered. "Hairy Hand of God, otherwise known as Lady Luck. Our Lady, if she's shinin that lamp on ya, she'll give you what you want."

The boat sat well in the water, evenly hipped and clean painted. In their rowlocks, the oars knocked and creaked with business. The working, operating feel of things pleased Quick Lamb. There was nothing more warming than the spectacle of something proceeding properly after a due amount of work. He was like that with rifles, with motors, drum reels, or some fancy roadhouse's new flushing toilet. If you didn't know how they worked, then things weren't worth having - something the old girl used to say.

"Hoping is what people do when they're too lazy to do anything else."

His wife was a good woman, and he understood that. But he remembered what the minister at Margaret River used to say - the good are fierce.