Tim Winton Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

And though I've lived to be an old man with my very own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.

Tim Winton
I love the sea but it does not love me. The sea is like a desert in that it is quite rightly feared. The sea and the desert are both hungry, they have things to be getting on with so you do not go into them lightly.

Tim Winton
The desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism.

Tim Winton
Ah, but you, Darkness, you know all this. I tell you night after night. Nothing will shock you. Maybe I go on at you in the hope that there's something beyond you. Some nights I sit here and talk and sob and stare out into the blackness thinking that if I look hard enough I'll see the light behind. But I stay out until the break of day, waiting, hoping, and there's only sunrise again.

Tim Winton
The night is full of stories. They float up like miasmas, as though the dead leave their dreams in the earth where you bury them, only to have them rise to meet you in sleep. Mostly the scenes are familiar, but sometimes everything is strange, the people unknown.

Tim Winton
I just sit here and tell the story as though I can't help it. There's always something in the day that reminds me, that sets me off all hot and guilty and scared and rambling and wistful, like I am now.

Tim Winton
It's sadness coming on like the old days, the vast seamless hopeless weight of sadness looking for a place to rest.

Tim Winton
And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light.

Tim Winton
It's dark already and I'm out here again, talking, telling the story to the quiet night.

Tim Winton
It's terrifying to think you can remember things you shouldn't possibly be able to. It's like that childhood fear of having your soul slip from your body in your sleep. The darkness, those black sheets of glass sliding over you, upping the pressure, pushing you through the time and space and story.

Tim Winton
It's how I fill the time when nothing's happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.

Tim Winton
Surviving is the strongest memory I have; the sense of having walked on water.

Tim Winton
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 bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water's edge.

Tim Winton
And you can't help but worry for them, love them, want for them - those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time and space without you.

Tim Winton
I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have

Tim Winton
When I was a girl I had this strong feeling that I didn't belong anywhere,... It was in my head, what I thought and dreamt, what I believed..., that's where I belonged, that was my country.

Tim Winton
I liked books - the respite and privacy of them - books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free.

Tim Winton
Somewhere a bicycle bell rings. Somewhere else there's a war on. Somewhere else people turn to shadows and powder in an instant and the streets turn to funnels and light the sky with their burning. Somewhere a war is over.

Tim Winton
It's funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it's all you ever think about.

Tim Winton
We rise to a challenge and set a course. We take a decision. You put your mind to something. Just deciding to do it gets you halfway there. Daring to try.

Tim Winton
Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room full of sleepers

Tim Winton