All of us recruits are equal in the eyes of the Army: low as you can go.

Maybe if I act well enough, I'll come to believe it myself.

I have never known what to tell anybody. Except that it is better to do something than nothing, even if the cost is great.

A Kiss," said Mogget sleepily. "Actually, just a breath would do. But you have to start kissing someone sometime, I suppose." "A breath?" she asked. She didn't want to kiss just any wooden man. He looked nice enough, but he might not be like his looks. A kiss seemed too forward.

Clearly the Old One had the capacity to kill - or easily deliver some sort of final ending that sounded remarkably like death.

Unhand my tail!" squealed the Will.

I think there is a kind of laconic Australian leg-pulling sense of humor that is certainly in some of my stories, or is an element in some of my books, and that's probably a direct result of where I've grown up. But other than that I don't draw particularly on the Australian landscape or the Australian biology and so on. So I don't think there's anything you could point to and say is particularly Australian.