Darkness, Be My Friend Quotes

“But it was my parents I longed for mostly. I wanted to be a little girl again and cuddle into them, wriggling in between them like I'd done in their bed when I was three or four, snug and warm in the safest place in the world.

Instead I had Hell.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“It's good to keep changing your mind. It shows you're thinking. I'll only stop changing my mind when I'm dead. And maybe not even then.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“We had enough years in front of us to be serious and grown-up and respectable. Why rush it? But on the other hand we always complained when teachers and other adults treated us as kids. In fact there was nothing that annoyed me more. So it was a frustrating situation. What we needed was a two-sided badge that said 'Mature' on one side and 'Childish' on the other. Then at any moment we could turn it to whatever side we felt like being and the adults could treat us accordingly.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“Well, I’ve learnt this much: it doesn’t matter
what it costs, it’s worth paying the price. You can’t live cheap
and you can’t live for nothing. Pay the price and be proud you’ve
paid it, that’s what I reckon.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“You can never stay angry too long in the bush though. At least, that's what I think. It's not that it's soothing or restful, because it's not. What it does for me is get inside my body, inside my blood, and take me over. I don't know that I can describe it any better than that. It takes me over and I become part of it and it becomes part of me and I'm not very important, or at least no more important than a tree or a rock or a spider abseiling down a long thread of cobweb. As I wandered around, on that hot afternoon, I didn't notice anything too amazing or beautiful or mindbogglingly spectacular. I can't actually remember noticing anything out of the ordinary: just the grey-green rocks and the olive-green leaves and the reddish soil with its teeming ants. The tattered ribbons of paperbark, the crackly dry cicada shell, the smooth furrow left in the dust by a passing snake. That's all there ever is really, most of the time. No rainforest with tropical butterflies, no palm trees or Californian redwoods, no leopards or iguanas or panda bears.

Just the bush.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“I guess our fate is up to us now. And we’ve
been there before, of course. There’s something quite comforting
about it in a strange way. We’ve learnt a few things. We know we’ve
got a few things going for us. A bit of imagination, a bit of guts
sometimes, a bit of spark.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“I just wished there was more room in my little body to accommodate all these violent wild feelings that kept screaming around inside me. I already had so much stuff squashed in there - liver and appendix and intestines and heart and all that junk. There was absolutely no room for feelings. But they still managed to squeeze in somewhere. Most of them lived in my stomach - a whole huge mess of them in there - but some kept crawling over my hands, and some stuck in my throat like I'd swallowed a doorknob.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“There's nothing like the very early morning. It's the sweetness of the air, the sweet coolness; it's the bubbling of the creek which, for some strange reaction, always sounds more energetic than it does later on; it's the gargling of the magpies.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“All I got out of it was a terrible feeling that I was a disgusting human being. It was so against everything I stood for, everything I believed in. The next day I felt awful. I had a terrible headache anyway, and my stomach felt like it was still doing slow spins, but worse, far worse, was the way I felt such a slut.
I felt sick at myself.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“Like I said, they can be pretty crazy, horses. Not as sensible as sheep.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“Ook in een tijd van vrede betaal je een prijs om trouw te blijven aan jezelf, om oprecht te leven.
Dit heb ik geleerd: hoeveel het ook kost, het is de prijs waard. Je kunt geen oppervlakkig of zinloos leven leiden. Betaal de prijs en wees er trots op dat je dat hebt gedaan, dat is mijn idee.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“What we needed was a two-sided badge that said ‘Mature’ on one side and ‘Childish’ on the other. Then at any moment we could turn it to whatever side we felt like being and the adults could treat us accordingly.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend