All Our Shimmering Skies Quotes

“Molly knows the secret to a long walk. Never think about the destination. Just think about the air in your lungs, the motion of your arms and legs. There is a rhythm to it, and once you have found it that rhythm can tick-tock through time forever.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“And what role are you playing today, Molly? Greta asks. Or are you still working on that twelve-year-old gravedigger girl who has convinced herself she's not being raised by monsters?”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“Because sadness is the truest emotion,” Greta says. “Happiness isn’t to be trusted. It’s a bald-faced liar. But the truth of your sadness enriches every other thing inside you, especially your joy. You shouldn’t be afraid to go to the place that makes you sad, Molly Hook. The more you go to that dark place inside you, the lighter it gets. You go there enough times, you realize that dark place is actually your sacred place. That place is all of you and the tears you take from that place are just the darkness leaking out, precious drop by precious drop. You following me?”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“Hearts don't turn to stone, Molly," Greta says. "But they do turn. One day your heart is filled with nothing but love and then something gets inside and mixes in with all that love and sometimes that something is black and sometimes it's cold and feels just like stone because it's heavy, and sometimes it gets so heavy you can't carry it inside you no more.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“Butterfly short life, Yukio says. But butterfly live forever.... - he raises a single forefinger - in one day.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“Ol' Bill's bein' all cagey because it's hard for blokes to admit a woman might choose death over putting up with more of their bullshit.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“No weights of gold to measure
Only scales of truth and lies
For we are living treasure
Under all our shimmering skies”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“Molly nods, thinks for a moment. "Do you think Ophelia deserved a Christian burial if she took her own life?"
Greta shrugs. "Poor girl wasn't thinkin' straight," she says. "That's what men can do to ya, Molly. Drive a girl bonkers; make her wanna go sleep forever in the nearest brook.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“...he said the land gives you all you need if you know the right way to ask for it.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“century ago, the Chinese outnumbered the Europeans here four to one”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“ground, and grey rock dust and debris pressed on”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“Death crawls here and death slithers. It bites and chomps and infects and infuses. Tell me of a land more determined to kill those who would dare embrace its beauty.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“She spots a large army of green ants building a nest between two thin twig branches of a flimsy tree with floppy green leaves. "Look at this, Yukio," Molly whispers, leaning into the tree where a line of ants with amber bodies and glowing jay-coloured abdomens are carrying a white grub along a designated worker road on a branch. "They make their homes out of leaves. Some of the ants are the tough ones who will work together to haul the leaves up, and some of the ants are the clever ones who will weave the leaves together, and some of them are gluers who use that white stuff they're carrying to stick all the leaves in place.

Yukio releases a brief sigh of awe. "Hmm."

"See the bridge?" Molly asks. The ants had built a bridge out of their own connected bodies to create a shortcut for the gluers wanting to access a branch below them. "I wish that fella Adolf Hitler could see this," Molly whispers.

"Hitler?" Yukio echoes confused.

"Yeah," Molly says. "We could get Hitler and what's-his-name—Musolino—"

"Mussolini," Yukio says.

"Yeah! Mussolini," Molly says. "We get Hitler, Mussolini, and Winston Churchill all together and they could come and look at this ant bridge for a while. Calm themselves down a bit. Just watching some green ants working for an hour or two.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“And you wouldn't believe what he said then, Tom Berry whispered to his enraptured audience. He said, he and his family saw no value whatsoever in all that gold. He said real treasure was a fresh water spring. He said that the real jewels of the earth were gooseberries that grow on trees. He said a good dig in his world is when you stick a fist down a bubble in the mud and find a long-necked turtle to grab hold of. He said true wealth isn't having your pockets filled with coin but your belly filled with white turtle flesh cooked in its juices, shelled down on a bed of coals. He said that the only use for gold was to glitter, and he said glitter of gold was like the glittering smiles of us white men he'd seen in town, dressed in expensive clothes. He said that gold can't be trusted. He said we've all got the gold disease and it rots our hearts. It poisons us. He said it changes who we are, how we behave.

[...]

He said the long-neck turtle didn't do that, Tom Berry said. He said that the turtle was a gift from the earth that kept on giving. He said he'd rubbed turtle fat on the chests of sick infants to make them strong again. He said the oil and meat from a single turtle can keep a dying elder alive to see an extra month of sunrises. And then he asked me if I thought a month of sunrises was worth more or less than the box of gold that rested in the hole below us. I said, "It depended on how you spent the gold and how you spent the month of sunrises." And Longcoat Bob smiled at that. And he pointed again at Tom Berry's chest and said, "Good heart, Tom Berry. You speak of good things that can come from gold.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“In all these years, he said, he was yet to come across a single gold nugget that brought any real happiness to the person who held it. Long coat bob said his family had found one large nugget long ago, centuries back, that resembled a human hand. And it became so coveted by members of his family that out caused fights between brother and sister, sister and mother, father and son. During one dispute an old woman struck her nephew with the gold hand. The nephew was struck dumb and his mental capacity was like a water hole that could never be more than half full after that. And the old woman was so ashamed by her actions that she begged Long Coat Bob's grandfather, the oldest living member of the family, to hide the gold away in a place where no one else could find it. And any other gold nuggets that were found from that moment on Long Coat Bob's grandfather reasoned, were best hidden away with it too.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“speaks through”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“And to the sky she makes a wish. She wishes to be water. Because water has no feeling. Water feels no pain. Water is never afraid. Water feels no sorrow. And she thinks about the life she could have had if she'd known how to move through this complex earth the way water always knows how to move through it.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“Life's always bringin' the grave to us, kid."
"Yeah, but why bring it so early to some and so late to others?"
"I'm afraid Hamlet's mum was right about that, Mol," Greta says.
"I forgot what she said about it."
"She said all lives must die." Greta says. "And she said we all know that shit's common."
"That shit's comin'?" Molly ponders.
"Common," Greta clarifies. "That shit's all too common."
Greta drags on her smoke, rests her head back on a rock. "But I guess it's always comin', too.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“You ever fired one of those?" Molly asks.
"A couple of wood ones on stage," Greta replies.
"Maybe you should get some practice," Molly says.
"I don't need any practice," Greta says. She stares down the length of the gun barrel with one eye closed. "Not much to it. Point and shoot and phone a lawyer.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“Then she says, "Let me get this straight. We just survived an aerial bombing from the Japs, right?"
"That's right," Molly says.
"Then we set off in search of buried treasure?"
"That's correct."
"Then we got attacked by a bunch of wild water buffalo?"
"I wouldn't say 'attacked'," Molly says. "But definitely fair to say we were charged by about ten water buffalo."
"What now?" Greta asks."
"Now we walk.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“Because sadness is the truest emotion," Greta says. "Happiness isn't to be trusted. It's a bald-faced liar. But the truth of your sadness enriches every other thing inside you, especially your joy. You shouldn't be afraid to go to the place that makes you sad, Molly Hook. The more you go to that dark place inside you, the lighter it gets. You go there enough times, you realize that dark place is actually your sacred place. That place is all of you and the tears you take from that place are just the darkness leaking out, precious drop by precious drop. You following me?”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“I reckon he's worth talkin about, Mol.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“Yukio...shoot through.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“The heart is warmed by warming the hearts of others. You only had a stone heart to give, she thinks, but she took it anyway.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“And she thinks about the life she could have had if she'd known how to move through this complex earth the way water always knows how to move through it.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“For you are blessed, Molly Hook. Never let a single person tell you any different.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies