Melina Marchetta - Saving Francesca (2003)

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It's Thursday afternoon, and we have sports. These are the choices for the girls: watching an invitational cricket game; studying in one of the classrooms; or watching the senior rugby league. As you can imagine, I'm torn.

Melina Marchetta
It's Tolstoy, by the way, I say as I open the door. He turns around. What? Shut up, I tell myself. Shut up. The writer of Anna Karenina. Not Trotsky. Trotsky was a revolutionary who was stabbed with a pickax in Mexico in 1940. But I can understand how the T thing could confuse you.

Melina Marchetta
The depression belongs to all of us. I think of the family down the road whose mother was having a baby and they went around the neighborhood saying, "We're pregnant." I want to go around the neighborhood saying, "We're depressed." If my mum can't get out of bed in the morning, all of us feel the same. Her silence has become ours, and it's eating us alive.

Melina Marchetta
People with lost personalities will suffer a great deal more than those with lost virginities.

Melina Marchetta
And I hear nothing because it's like the volume button has been turned down on our lives and nobody has anything to say anymore." "I want to be an adjective again. But I am a noun.

Melina Marchetta
I'd read fantasy if they had simple names like Jane and Bob from Wagga," I say. "Why does it have to be Tehrana and Bihaad from the World of Sceehina?" Jimmy looks at my mother and rolls his eyes. "No wonder they call her bimbo behind her back." And my mum laughs. And because of that, Mark Viduka, the soccer player, stops being my brothers hero, and Luca and Pinocchio run after Jimmy like he's their idol.

Melina Marchetta
The people I'm stuck with in my life now aren't sucking the life out of me, they just suck.

Melina Marchetta
I used to tell your mother she looked like Sophia Lauren." He looks at me, frowning, and then it registers. "Oh God, some guy's using that line on you, isn't he?" "Not just 'some guy'." I tell him. "The guy.

Melina Marchetta
You're judging her by her literacy," Tara says. "You're a literacist." "You've made that up.

Melina Marchetta
And being that happy makes me feel guilty. Because I shouldn't be. Not while my mum is feeling the way she is. How I can dare to be happy is beyond me, and I hate my guts for it.

Melina Marchetta
It's how they've stayed popular for so long. By not doing anything that will make them look like fools. They never leave home without their safety nets and I think, good for them, but the thing with safety nets is this. I got tangled in them so many times and the Stella girls always seemed to leave me dangling, upside down, to the point where I almost couldn't breathe anymore.

Melina Marchetta
Do you want to hang out? At your place or something?" Hanging out with Jimmy Hailler will mean that I have to say hello to him every day. I'm not ready to say hello to him every day. Too much commitment. It's bad enough that I'm sharing chocolate brownies swith him. I shake my head. "Not today.

Melina Marchetta
I just want it to go back to the way it was." "It'll never go back to the way it was, Frankie. But you have to make sure it goes forward.

Melina Marchetta
My old school, St Stella's, only goes to Year Ten and most of my friends now go to Pius Senior College, but my mother wouldn't allow it because she says the girls there leave with limited options and she didn't bring me up to have limitations placed upon me. If you know my mother, you'll sense there's an irony there, based on the fact that she is the Queen of the Limitation Placers in my life.

Melina Marchetta
It's like you have a plan and someone comes along and makes you want to change it all, but you still like your first plan, no matter how fantastic the second one makes you feel.

Melina Marchetta
A piece of me is gone," she told me once while we were bra shopping. "I think we're made up of all these different pieces and every time someone goes, you're left with less of yourself.

Melina Marchetta
It's a weird smile, but it reaches his eyes and I bottle it. And I put it in my ammo pack that's kept right next to my soul and Justine's spirit and Siobhan's hope and Tara's passions. Because if I'm going to wake up one morning and not be able to get out of bed, I'm going to need everything I've got to fight this disease that could be sleeping inside of me.

Melina Marchetta
Everything's going to be fine. She'll be back at work soon. Let's just keep the house clean." Oh yeah, I want to say, because a clean house will result in peace in the Middle East as well.

Melina Marchetta
No. But it's like the argument don't donate to third-world countries because the money mightn't get to them.' People only say that because it makes them feel better about the fact that they do nothing.

Melina Marchetta
The idea that God works in mysterious ways is rubbish. There's nothing mysterious about his ways. They're premeditated and slightly conniving, and they place you in an impossible situation.

Melina Marchetta
Oh God, Frankie, I breathe in rhythm with that man. You think that's not my flesh and blood after all these years?

Melina Marchetta
I look around for the counter that sells my scent, but I'm so petrified that if I spray it in the air, nothing will come out. And then Mia's scent seems to fade away and everything else fades away with it and I know that all I have to do to recapture it is press the spray button again.

Melina Marchetta
Sometimes Thomas Mackee will stick an earphone into my ear and ask me to listen to a song. When I get over the revulsion of putting something in my ear that's been in his, I sit back and let the music take over, and for a half hour there's something comforting about someone's heart beating at the same rhythm as mine.

Melina Marchetta
I think I'm a bit in love with these girls. They make me feel giddy. Like I haven't a care in the world. Like I'm fearless. Like I used to be.

Melina Marchetta
For a moment I can't help thinking how decent he is - that there's some hope for him beyond the obnoxious image he displays. Maybe deep down he is a sensitive guy, who sees us as real people with real issues. I want to say something nice. Some kind of thanks. I stand there, rehearsing it in my mind. "Oh my God," he says, "did you see that girl's tits?" Maybe not today.

Melina Marchetta