Thorn Birds - Colin McCullough

Memory wasn’t a patch on reality; try as she would, the actual sensation couldn’t be conjured up, only a shadow of it, like a thin sad cloud.

Trees only looked the same to those who didn’t know how hearts could mark out as singular and special one tree in a wilderness of trees.

No man sees himself in a mirror as he really is, nor any woman.

To say yes, commit herself to him, and then have to watch him recoil when he found out the extent of her inadequacy? Unbearable! He would learn what she was really like, and the knowledge would kill his love for her. Unbearable to say yes, and end in being rebuffed for all time. Far better to do any rebuffing herself.

For only those who have slipped and fallen know the vicissitudes of the way.

I might burn in Hell alongside you, but I know the Hell they’ve got planned for you: to see my indifference to you persist as we rot away together through all eternity….

Each of us has something within us which won’t be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die. We are what we are, that’s all. Like the old Celtic legend of the bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying. Because it has to, it’s driven to. We can know what we do wrong even before we do it, but self-knowledge can’t affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it’s the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.

To look into his eyes and not see him! It was a cruel joke, a punishment.

At the beginning of each day he willed himself not to die, and at the end of each day he laughed in triumph to find himself still alive.

Never in all her life had Justine been so conscious of the redundancy of women in the lives of some men as at that moment, walking into a world where women simply had no place except as humble nun servants.

And gradually his memory slipped a little, as memories do, even those with so much love attached to them; as if there is an unconscious healing process within the mind which mends up in spite of our desperate determination never to forget.

Don’t worry about it, sweetie. God was very good to you; he didn’t give you any brains. Believe me, it’s far more comfortable that way. You’ll never offer the Lords of Creation any competition.

That was the trouble with being an island; one forgot there was anything going on beyond its shores.

You’re all the same, great big hairy moths bashing yourselves to pieces after a silly flame behind a glass so clear your eyes don’t see it. And if you do manage to blunder your way inside the glass to fly into the flame, you fall down burned and dead. While all the time out there in the cool night there’s food, and love, and baby moths to get. But do you see it, do you want it? No! It’s back after the flame again, beating yourselves senseless until you burn yourselves dead!

And though she never saw him again as long as she lived, it seemed likely that her last thought this side of the grave would be of him. How frightening, that one person could mean so much, so many things.

...she wanted to feel, wanted emotion to blow over her like a strong hot wind. She didn’t want to plod like a little automaton for the rest of her life, she wanted change and vitality and love. Love, and a husband, and babies.