Dirt Music Quotes

“Dirt music, Fox tells Georgie, is "anything you can play on a verandah or porch, without electricity.”
― Tim Winton, Dirt Music

“You can hide in someone else's rage - it blinds them”
― tim winton, Dirt Music

“This land looks dreamt, willed, potent.”
― Tim Winton, Dirt Music

“At him come flickering jabs of memory that stew his blood and bones as the house creaks on its stumps and his trees groan. Gulping creek. Stones alight and ahum. The yellow sand jitters with the chime of that National guitar. It drones, drones in the metal bedframe and at his ear the hot Vegemite breath of a child. Rosin. Brass-wound strings. Campfires, campfires. Spill of dirty blonde. Feral beard up at the end of a pole and his mother crouched amidst a paddock of melons which drink silent as hunkered birds. Basket of eggs: chinking, holy brownshelled bumnuts. And that boyhood feeling, the conviction that nothing bad will ever happen, that things will always be the same.”
― Tim Winton, Dirt Music

“He stares along the dappled bank. As a boy he thought the place was alive somehow. At night in bed he felt the ooze of sap, the breathing leaves, the air displaced by birds, and he understood that if you watched from the corner of your eye the grasstrees would dance out there and people wriggle from hollow-burnt logs. Those days you could come down here and stand in the water on the shallow spit and clear your mind. Stare at the sun-torched surface and break it into disparate coins of light. Actually stop thinking and go blank. It was harder than holding your breath. You could stand there, stump-still, mind clean as an animal’s, and hear melons splitting in the heat. A speck of light, you were, an ember. And happy. Even after his mother died he had it, though it waned. Later on only music got him there. And now that is gone there is only work. It’s a world without grace. Unless the only grace left is simply not feeling the dead or sensing the past.”
― Tim Winton, Dirt Music

“A bit of grit was useful. As a girl she’d had it in spades, hadn’t she? She despised her sisters’ girly meekness, the cunning, desperate way they strove for cuteness out of fear of losing favour. They were strategically pliable. And Georgie was not. Yet she was the loner in the family. An uncle once said she had more balls than her father. He was the one who felt her up when she was fifteen. She went upstairs to her father’s desk and showed him a business card which caused his eyes to widen. His boss, the editor of the newspaper he worked for, was her father’s sailing partner and here were his private numbers. If her uncle ever entered a room she was in without another adult present, she told him, she would make the call. That certainly pepped up Christmas gatherings in the Jutland house. She learned to steel herself. Georgie took that martial bearing onto the wards of a dozen hospitals. Along with a sense of humour, it helped when you were extracting a Barbie doll or a Perrier bottle from some weeping adventurer’s rectum. It immured you from the sight of your favourite sister’s nails bitten down to the quick. Or the gunshot sound of a camel’s legs breaking when run down by a speeding Cadillac. It mostly protected you from the sensation that you were making do, that your own soul was withering.”
― Tim Winton, Dirt Music

“Neither the boat nor the bloke in Manila meant a damn thing to her; they were of as little consequence as every other site she’d visited in the last six hours. In fact, she had to struggle to remember how she’d spent the time. She had traipsed through the Uffizi without any more attention than a footsore tourist. She’d stared at a live camera image of a mall in the city of Perth, been to the Frank Zappa fan club of Brazil, seen Francis Drake’s chamberpot in the Tower of London and stumbled upon a chat group for world citizens who yearned to be amputees. Logging on—what a laugh. They should have called it stepping off.”
― Tim Winton, Dirt Music

“Me? I belong to Jesus Christ. Like it or not. They wet you and get you. Anyway. No other bastard will have me.”
― Tim Winton, Dirt Music

“wash the black mud from my hands. On a light given off by the grave I kneel in the quick of the moon At the heart of a distant forest And hold in my arms a child Of water, water, water.”
― Tim Winton, Dirt Music

“is bitter. She declaims into his face: And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in their stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.”
― Tim Winton, Dirt Music

“Fox grins. Go strides to the rear of the Ford. His manner never alters. The Vietnamese has purposeful intensity down pat.”
― Tim Winton, Dirt Music