The Swan Book Quotes

“A goddess who had dragged herself out of the ocean then become an ordinary old woman.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“So my brain is as stuffed as some old broken-down Commodore you see left in the bush.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“It was very difficult, impossible really, to survive if you never existed.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“But...even true stories have to be invented sometimes to be remembered.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“People tell stories all the time: the stories they want told, where any story could be changed or warped this way or that.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“We are swapping band-aid education for brand new education, sealing the cracks – all the holes in the broken-down fences of Australian education policy for Indigenous peoples. Yes, they continued the better education, we know what is best rhetoric in their on-going war with the sceptic observer whom they continually accused was pass em this and not pass em that – always out to destroy Aboriginal people like a record still stuck in the same grove. Anyway. Whatever. Agree or not. This was the hammer, even in officially recognised Aboriginal Government, pulping confidence. The hammer that knocked away the small gains through any slip of vigilance. The faulty hammer that created weak ladders to heaven.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“Suddenly, the swan dropped down from the sky, flew low over the swamp, almost touching the water, just slow enough to have a closer look at the girl. The sight of the swan’s cold eye staring straight into hers, made the girl feel exposed, hunted and found, while all those who had suddenly stopped eating fish, watched this big black thing look straight at the only person that nobody had ever bothered having a close look at. Her breathing went AWOL while her mind stitched row after row of fretting to strangle her breath: What are they thinking about me now? What did the swan have to single me out for and not anyone else standing around? What kind of premonition is this? Heart-thump thinking was really tricky for her. She feasted on a plague of outsidedness. It was always better never to have to think about what other people thought of her.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“It's not that shit happens as other people have said; it's the eternal reality of a legacy in brokenness that was the problem to them.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“Which way should you run to escape this world?”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“Men from the mountaintops will always come down to the molehill to conquer it. That will always be the vice of the conquerors.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“Now very old people with minds crippled by dementia, the bewildered parents were not interested in mysteries at that stage in their life, and were still fearful of welfare people like the Army coming back to plague them over their failure-to-thrive baby, and poking around with accusing fingers at their families’ histories for evidence of grog harm on the little girl’s brain—as if they didn’t already know what happens to the inheritors of oppression and dispossession.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“Were they really Aboriginal? Did they really belong to Warren Finch's ancestral country? Anthropologists, lawyers and other experts, like archeologists, sociologists and historians, were called to examine the genealogies of these people. And emergency legislation was bulldozed through parliament in the dead of night which claimed that Warren Finch was the blood relative of every Australian, which gave power to the government to decide where he was to be buried.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“Her mind was only a lonely mansion for the stories of extinction.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“Warren's guests had learnt about poverty, not from being poor themselves, in places where you did not hear the screams and yelling of help.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“How could any of the swamp people explain this comfortable face they saw on television that held a universal magic capable of mirroring the faces of countless millions of ordinary people, who like themselves, had been duped by their own sense of community into recognizing some uncanny likeness and affinity between themselves and Warren Finch?”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“He was a child, but his mind was already laden like a museum, where old and new specimens, facts and figures, lived together as evidence of his own personal history.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“They kept poking him in his bony ribs, wanting to know: Who do you reckon you are? What his name was and why he kept saying that his house had disappeared and all that. It is very hard to lose a house. Why would anyone want to do that?”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“If you leave here, you know what is going to happen don’t you? People are going to stop and stare at you the very instant they see the colour of your skin, and they will say: She is one of those wild Aboriginals from up North, a terrorist; they will say you are one of those faces kept in the Federal Government’s Book of Suspects.

Bella Donna said that even though she had never seen this book for herself, she had heard that it had the Australian Government’s embossed crest on the cover, and was kept at the Post Office where anyone could study it. What was a post office? The girl had listened.

This was the place where they kept faces plucked from the World Wide Web by Army intelligence looking at computers all day long, searching for brown- and black-coloured criminals, un-assimilables, illegal immigrants, terrorists – all the undesirables; those kind of people.

Never ever leave the swamp, she said, adding that her own skin did not matter, but the girl was the colour of a terrorist, and terrorism was against the law.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book