Quote 1:
Months passed, winter easing gently into place, as southern winters do. The sun, warm as a blanket, wrapped Kya’s shoulders, coaxing her deeper into the marsh…
Collected Quotes
Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees
"Human remains... what exactly did that mean? Was it a few hard bones and soft tissue? Clothes and accessories? Things solid and compact enough to fit inside a coffin? Or was it rather the intangible – the words we send out into the ether, the dreams we keep to...
Percival Everett, James
"I really wanted to read. Though Huck was asleep, I could not chance his waking and discovering me with my face in an open book. Then I thought, how could he know that I was actually reading? ... At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If...
Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
Quote 1: She was scared a bit about moving, leaving Knoxville. I couldn't believe it. I told her there's trees, mountains, rivers, birds singing in your ears, we've got the whole rest of the world over there, other than people, which are just one thing. Going wherever...
Behind Their Closed Doors (A cabaret on a train)
Coming soon to the Sydney Fringe Festival, 2026! (run time approx. 50 minutes) Synopsis: “One train carriage, seven people, ten songs… everyone’s going to the end of the line, but what will they discover about each other and themselves along the way?” This is an...
Touching the Incas (short story, 1000 words)
A travel story about how we are often capable of more than we think.Excerpt: "Once, there was a girl. And the girl dreamed of the Andes. She wanted to reach through the ages to touch the Incas; walking along the same ground, over the same stones, in the same...
Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho
Jane Eyre. It was an Oxford World's Classics edition. Similar to the one we owned and similarly worn from constant handling. There was a difference between a book that was regularly opened and a book that was not. The smell, the resistance of the spine, the ease with...
Anna Funder, All That I Am
Quote 1: "The beauty of this city is too elemental, too fecund and raw, to be tamed by mere money. Though the financiers and bankers and dot.com millionaires hug the shoreline, their topiary palaces and towered developments will never conquer this landscape....
Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea
Quote 1: The weather stayed awful almost all of the time. Cold and brown and windy. But one day in the middle of April the sun came out and William and I walked out on the rocks–it was low tide–and then we walked to a closed store that was the only other building out...
Tim Winton, Cloudstreet
"Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with...
Kintsugi: Golden Joinery
A blind man’s fingers
Would trace a path
Across the knotted folds
Of knobbled flesh;
Linger over loss lines
Feel the weeping writ there