Your friends are at the house.' I sit up, straight. 'Who'? 'I don't know. Weird people. The Sullivan girl, whose father got the Gosford police to pick you up.' 'Siobhan?' 'And another one who's making cups of tea for everyone, and keeping the boy who's telling Luca fart jokes away from the girl who says he's "the last bastion of patriarchal poor taste".' 'Justine, Thomas and Tara.' And the drug fiend, Jimmy, is keeping Mia calm and the Trombal boy's rung about ten times. I don't like his manner on the phone.' 'You won't like any guy's manner on the phone.

Memory is a funny thing. It tricks you into believing that you've forgotten important moments, and then when you're raking your brain for a bit of information that might make sense of something else, it taps you on the head and says, "Remember when you told me to put that memory in the green rubbish bin? Well, I didn't, I put it in the black recycling tub, and it's coming your way again.

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.

She knows that feeling too. Of believing that each time someone says her name, it’s to tell her that something bad has happened.

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.

I wasn't there that day to get on the three forty-seven to Yass", he says. "I was there to throw myself in front of it.

His father's made us paint half this town and if we stick around any longer he'll make us paint the rest of it." -Jonah Griggs