Nick

– Ransom by David Malouf

Memorable Quotations

Part I

* ‘The sea has many voices. The voice this man is listening for is the voice of his mother.’ p. 3

* ‘he had hung curled in a dream of pre-existence and was rocked and comforted.’ p. 3

* The man is a fighter, but when he is not fighting he is a farmer, earth is his element. One day, he knows, he will go back to it. All the grains that were miraculously called together at his birth…will separate and go their own ways again. He is a child of earth.’ p. 4

* ‘She was his secret.’ p. 5

* ‘the play of a dual self that had allowed him, in a moment, to slip out of his hard boyish nature and become eel-like, fluid, weightless, without substance in his mother’s arms.’ p. 5

* ‘He had grieved. But silently, never permitting himself to betray to others what he felt.’ p. 5

* ‘Somewhere in the depths of sleep his spirit had made a crossing and not come back, or it had been snatched up and transformed.’ pp. 5-6

* ‘A world of pain, loss, dependency, bursts of violence and elation; of fatality and fatal contradictions, breathless leaps into the unknown;’ p. 6

* ‘In the long vista of time he might already be gone. It is time, not space, he is staring into.’ p. 6

* ‘Such a life is death to the warrior spirit.’ p. 7

* ‘War should be practised swiftly, decisively. Thirty days at most, in the weeks between new spring growth and harvest….’ p. 7

* ‘his mind, even in its passive state, the most active part of him.’ p. 8

* ‘But the sea is not where it will end. It will end here on the beach in the treacherous shingle, or out there on the plain. That is fixed, inevitable. With the pious resignation of the old man he will never become, he has accepted this.’ p. 9

* ‘in some other part of himself, the young man he is resists, and it is the buried rage of that resistance that drives him out each morning to tramp the shore. Not quite alone. With his ghosts.’ p. 10

* ‘Patroclus, his...