|
482e72c
|
To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.
|
|
fiction
|
Peter Carey |
|
88fec0e
|
You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
3380a16
|
People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
11b53ca
|
But now she could not bear the way she sounded. She was not a person anyone could love. ... And thus fled to her room. There she wept, bitterly, an ugly sound punctuated by great gulps. She could not stop herself. She could hear his footsteps in the passage outside. He walked up and down, up and down. 'Come in,' she prayed. 'Oh dearest, do come in.' But he did not come in. He would not come in. This was the man she had practically contracte..
|
|
fiction
|
Peter Carey |
|
1919bc2
|
From the story The Last Days of a Famous Mime) He said nothing. He was mildly annoyed at her presumption: that he had not thought this many, many times before. With perfect misunderstanding she interpreted his passivity as disdain. Wishing to hurt him, she slapped his face. Wishing to hurt her, he smiled brilliantly.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
6dea4e1
|
Oh, we were a degree or two hotter than improper.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
8c9e422
|
He was tender with her. He wiped her eyelids with his handkerchief, not noticing how soiled it was. It was stained with ink, crumpled, stuck together. Her lids were large and tender and the handkerchief was stiff, not nearly soft enough. He moistened a corner in his mouth. He was painfully aware of the private softness of her skin, of how the eyes trembled beneath their coverings. He dried the tears with an affection, a particularity, that ..
|
|
fiction
|
Peter Carey |
|
a7e6060
|
She could marry this man, she knew, and still be captain of her soul.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
ed07a16
|
I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
42c4302
|
I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
3215920
|
Swimming always cleans your soul
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
2dd7d56
|
She held out her hand, like a man. He hesitated, then took the hand and shook it. It was very warm. You could not help but be aware of the wild passage of blood on the other side of its wall, veins, capillaries, sweat glands, tiny factories in the throes of complicated manufacture. [He] looked at the eyes and, knowing how eyes worked, was astonished, not for the first time, at the infinite complexity of Creation, wondering how this thing, t..
|
|
hand
fire
|
Peter Carey |
|
ad3af35
|
Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling - until now - had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, ..
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
5997f40
|
Theophilus Hopkins was a moderately famous man. You can look him up in the 1860 Britannica. There are three full columns about his corals and his corallines, his anemones and starfish. It does not have anything very useful about the man. It does not tell you what he was like. You can read it three times over and never guess that he had any particular attitude to Christmas pudding.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
237f294
|
My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
2d481d5
|
What a torture to hear that a life had been available to me that I had not been man enough to live.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
9e5f005
|
He were still smiling but his voice were hard as a spoon rattling in a metal cup.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
53ae730
|
Would you rather have the lords and nobles back? What is Democracy for? Not so we can rob each other. Or cheat.' I said and felt the teeth in it, the cleat, the cut, the eat.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
cf1f019
|
7. Some Theories that Arose at the Time 1. The world is merely a dream dreamt by god who is waking after a long sleep. When he is properly awake the world will disappear completely. When the world disappears we will disappear with it and be happy. 2. The world has become sensitive to light. In the same way that prolonged use of, say, penicillin can suddenly result in a dangerous allergy, prolonged exposure of the world to the sun has made..
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
5c92791
|
A cormorant broke the surface, like an improbable idea tearing the membrane between dreams and life.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
00d4e4b
|
She had no criticism of his dress, which was bagged at the knees, dropping at the lapels, rucked around the buttons, while she-although she wore a flowing white cotton-appeared (she knew it and wished it was not so) as starched and pressed as a Baptist in a riding habit. They were different, and yet not ill matched. They had both grown used to the attentions that are the eccentric's lot-the covert glances, smiles, whispers, worse. Lucinda w..
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
1c28e9c
|
If you know the country he said then you will be a wild colonial boy forever
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
32baa68
|
Your grandfather were a quiet and secret man he had been ripped from his home in Tipperary and transported to the prisons of Van Diemen's Land I do not know what was done to him he never spoke of it. When they had finished with their tortures they set him free and he crossed the sea to the colony of Victoria. He were by this time 30 yr. of age red headed and freckled with his eyes always slitted against the sun. My da had sworn an oath to e..
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
564a6f4
|
a country where we seldom understand that we must be prepared to fight for issues bigger than an umpire's decision at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
d552800
|
the hair...that frizzy nest which grew outwards, horizontal like a wind-blown tree in an Italianate painting.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
d77640e
|
however she was a woman and I'd have more luck conjuring up the thoughts of a chinaman than I would figuring out what she was conspiring
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
5913bf4
|
The seamen had whitewashed the smoky ceilings of the ward, and that dear homely smell carried the vividness of thatch and lumpy walls and stew given from the goodness of a stranger's heart. But that was all there was of comfort, and the salt air had turned from cold to warm in the passing of a life, an afternoon.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
119324c
|
Lucinda might sneak from her own house at midnight to place a wager somewhere else, but she dared not touch the pack that lay in her own sideboard. She knew how passionate he had become about his 'weakness.' She dared not even ask him how it was he had reversed his opinions on the matter. But, oh, how she yearned to discuss it with him, how much she wished to deal a hand on a grey wool blanket. There would be no headaches then, only this sw..
|
|
fiction
|
Peter Carey |
|
b43af85
|
About her husband, i did actually enquire, but she held her private life so fucking tightly, like a tourist clutching a handbag on the A train,..
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
3170678
|
We are alive on the very brink of eternity.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
f41adcb
|
HIs great talent in life was to be a Good Bloke. He could walk into a room and sit down and everybody would be happy to have him, even if all he ever did was smile, for they imagined behind the mustache, behind the smile it hid, something sterner, more critical and yet, also, tolerant, so that when he smiled they felt themselves approved of and they vied with each other to like him best.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
19a939b
|
His hair was a curling mess and he showed the proper desregard for sartorial elegance which Harry had always seen as a sign of reliability in a person. Neat men always struck him as desperate and ambitious.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
fb0762c
|
The cicadas, as if they were wired on the same circuit, suddenly filled the garden with a loud burst of celebration.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
8580ab6
|
It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat Bitter according to your mood.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
afb212b
|
And in it's magical pattern there was now a new element, a new glow, a cast of a golden colour which suffused everything, the source of which was a character in a book he had half read of and would never finish. He was not interested in what happened to Jay Gatsby. He was only interested that Jay Gatsby should exist.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
f90af40
|
She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
a517973
|
She felt his personality to be round and smooth and free from nasty spikes.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
1b4a8aa
|
after we ate we was silent on our blankets looking out across the mighty Great Divide I never seen this country before it were like a fairy story landscape the clear and windy skies was filled with diamonds the jagged black outlines of the ranges were a panorama. You're going to ride a horse across all that. I know. He laughed and he were right I knew nothing of what lay ahead. See that there he pointed. That is called the Crosscut Saw and ..
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
a5beb30
|
His great carved wooden head was marked with a black eye that was more yellow than black and from this spectacular bed of bruised flesh the eye itself, sand irritated, bloodshot, as wild as a currawong's, stared out at a landscape in which the tops of fences protruded from windswept sand.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
b65bd3c
|
She thought: When we are two, they do not notice us. They think us a match. What wisdom does a mob have? It is a hydra, an organism, stupid or dangerous in much of its behaviour, but could it have, in spite of this, a proper judgement about which of its component parts fit best together?
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
3d544ae
|
The clouds was light but queerly yellow on their edges as they moved across the ageless constellations.
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
21b3de3
|
chooks. You cannot go away and leave
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
74c456a
|
men in high collars who might--this
|
|
|
Peter Carey |
|
1a5b388
|
To refrigerate a clock was an extremely violent act, not one I could explain to anyone.
|
|
refrigerator
|
Peter Carey |