The Lieutenant Quotes

“Everything in his life had come down to the sensation of her fingers against his. The person he was, the history he carried within himself, every joy and grief he had ever experienced, slipped way like an irrelevant garment. He was nothing but skin, speaking to another skin, and between the skins there was no need to find any words.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“What an astonishing thing, that her praise filled his heart.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“Man had been given a brain that could think in numbers, and it could not be coincidence that the world was unlocked by that very tool. To understand any aspect of the cosmos was to look on the face of God: not directly, but by a species of triangulation, because to think mathematically was to feel the action of God in oneself.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“Violence had an enlivening effect. As long as someone else was the victim it made the blood pump, gave the world an edge of glamour.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“The self that had laughed and raised his glass and shouted out the words with the others seemed to him now to be foolishly, dangerously, disastrously innocent.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“Some kinds of order were too vast for a human to know. But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you did not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you. His friendship with Tagaran was not a list of objects, or the words for things eaten or not eaten, thrown or not thrown. It was the slow constructing of the map of a relationship.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“He had seen God in the night sky long before he understood its patterns.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“Until you could put yourself at some point beyond your own world, looking back at it, you would never see how everything worked together.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“He hoped that all understanding might be as simple as a matter of scale. If a man had not a week, not a year, not even a lifetime—if he had millennia, aeons—all the seemingly erratic movements of heavenly bodies and earthly vicissitudes would turn out to have meaning. Some kinds of order were too vast for a human to know. But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“He sat in the chapel for hours picking his way through fugues. A dozen notes, hardly music. But then those few notes spoke to each other, subject and answer, by repetition, by diminution, by augmentation, even looping backwards on themselves in a course like the retrograde motion of Mars. He listened as if he had as many ears as fingertips, and, like a blind man, could feel textures that were barely there. At the end of two or three pages of music he would hear all the voices twining together in a construction of such dizzying power that the walls of the chapel could barely contain it.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“It was a leap into the other”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“To understand any aspect of the cosmos was to look on the face of God: not directly, but by a species of triangulation, because to think mathematically was to feel the action of God in oneself.”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant

“What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you did not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you. His friendship with Tagaran was not a list of objects, or the words for things eaten or not eaten, thrown or not thrown. It was the slow constructing of the map of a relationship. [...] Learning a language was not a matter of joining any two points with a line. It was a leap into the other. [...] Until you could put yourself at some point beyond your own world, looking back at it, you would never see how everything worked together”
― Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant