David Malouf

Everything he knew about where he was was nothing compared with what he was feeling, and he pressed his hand to his chest, to see if it would steady him and it didn't.

And so they didn't, for years, see beyond him. It was only later, in the last days of the third summer, when they found out what it was sure that they had already known, that girls and boys can't grow up together.

Would it strain relations if he made a note for himself - in the code he had made up for himself - to lay a terrible curse upon this country?

His mind had worked it out for itself, that there was a use to despair. It had worked it out in his absence; it was ready for him when he came back.

They had not seen anybody quite so ugly as him for a while. They looked at him overtly, curiously. What figures in Calcutta cities there must be that are as ugly as him!

There was the smell of lupins and there was the weight of the heat; a good Taparoro summer, and who is mauri to weigh it against him? He did, over and over. And so it defeated him.

Each generation thinks it invented sin; it is all the next generation ever knows.

He couldn't keep that clear border from crossing his chest and wondering over it because he hadn't grown up in the world outside, had crossed a pale of its kind once only and would find no welcome.

If you have no memory of your own people, of course you will feel no drive to go back. But when a man grows up in a people, no matter how deep he sinks himself below their notional center, he will always want to go back.

It brought home to him what a nowhere man he really was, in a space where one trees the same as the next and the next, the same as the last.

How treacherous memory could be, and how quickly it could goad the stomach or torture it, and there was nothing you could do.

They did not look as though they had cared very much for their skins, and it was unknown to the gulls of the Flying Cliffs, what was done with a skin only when its former owner didn't want to own it any more.