A few people would suffer, but a lot of people would be better off.”It’s just not right,’ said Kevin stubbornly. ‘Maybe not. But neither’s your way of looking at it. There doesn’t have to be...

How funny are dogs?

I’m a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that’s me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I’d die; I don’t know what...

Life’s harder, the deeper you feel things, was all I could think as I put the books away. Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they’re like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they’re...

I can’t describe the feeling when I go down – it’s down down down and there’s never going to be an up again. And whatever was good isn’t good any more; white becomes grey, music...

We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.

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.

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...

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It’s like the stories of our lives make us the...

So, that was Nature’s way. The mosquito felt pain and panic but the dragonfly knew nothing of cruelty. Humans would call it evil, the big dragonfly destroying the mosquito and ignoring the little insects suffering....

The Bible just said ‘Thou shalt not kill’, then told hundreds of stories of people killing each other and becoming heroes, like David with Goliath.

We believed we were safe. That was the big fantasy.

Some people wake up drowsy. Some people wake up energized. I wake up dead.

Dying’s a fearful popular activity these days so we often double ’em up.

My survival was up to me. I had nothing and I had no one. What I did have, I told myself, was my mind, my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. These were important...

It was the world-without-adults daydream. In my dream I’d never quite figured out where the adults went but we kids were free to roam, to help ourselves to anything we wanted. We’d pick up a...

I lay there with my mind running amuck, on the brink of madness. And somehow, gradually, early Sunday morning, I became calm. I can’t think of any other word for it. I was thinking about...

What’s the Future? It’s a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren’t the lines we wanted.

They say teenagers can sleep all day. I often used to look at dogs and be amazed by the way they seemed to sleep for twenty hours a day. But I envied them too. It...

But somehow, standing in the clear night air, under a sky that glowed like a shower of sparks, none of that stuff mattered. It slipped off me. It was like shedding your clothes before you...

I feel like I’m dropping such a long way down again.” “I seem to be dropping into a cold dark wet place, where no one’s been before and noone can every follow. There’s no future...

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...

I remembered Robyn telling me the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and how they’d survived: when the King chucked them in the furnace and an angel or someone went in with them. The furnace...

That night in bed I was thinking about the way creeks and streams operate. They start off little, gurgling and bubbling and jumping over rocks and stuff, full of energy, going all over the place....

We’ll never feel safe again, and so it’s bye-bye innocence. It’s been nice knowing you, but you’re gone now.

Some people wake up fast. Some people wake up slow. I wake up dead.

Light is important to us humans. It influences our moods, our perceptions, our energy levels. A face glimpsed among trees, dappled by the shadows and the green-tinged light reflected from the forest, will seem quite...

I felt that my life was permanently damaged, that I could never be normal again, that the rest of my life would just be a shell.

The only true test of friendship is the time your friend spends on you.