English Year 8 - Laurinda: Quotes

“The difference, I recognised, was that I was well liked and Tully wasn’t.” (p19)

“This was the first time – the first time! – since arriving at Laurinda that I had felt anything like the spontaneity and fun that I had felt back at Christ Our Saviour.” (p212)

“The one thing I wanted to do was hold him again.” (p273)

“I learned that to have integrity means piecing together all the separate parts of yourself and your life.” (p336)

“I am grateful that I carry a little piece of Stanley with me wherever I go, wherever I end up.” (p336) 

“With very long hair braided into a plait and a Madeira-cake face flecked with freckles.” (p39)

“On that first day at lunchtime, I found my first friend.” (p56)

“And here was Katie, proposing something radical: that she would support whichever self I needed to be out in the world.” (p305)  

“This was a woman who had never picked up a book in her life; the only literature she looked at was the BI-LO and Safeway ads that arrived in our letterbox every Tuesday. Yet her fingertips could read that piece of polyester fibre like a blind person read Braille.” (p12)

“For her, happiness was hoarding seventeen tins of sweetened condensed milk in the cupboard. We drank our coffee in silence.” (p18)

“My mother’s point was this: be vigilant and be silent. It was almost our family motto.” (p289) 

“Amber’s beauty was so distracting that she didn’t need to develop much of a personality.” (p58)

“Then she swung her body around and gave the broken door a swift and sharp and forceful kick – a very hard one – and then came a sound I would never forget, like when you snap apart a cooked chicken wing.” (p227)

“Brodie did not smile very often, but when she did, it was not an invitation to friendship but a signal to ward off closeness.” (p58) 

“He wanted me to get out of Stanley. He wanted me out of there for my own good. Where we lived was not a place where good stories began, but a place where bad stories retreated, like small mongrel dogs bitten by much larger, thoroughbred ones.” (p6) 

“Mrs Leslie, my remedial English teacher, was the most attractive older lady I had ever seen.” (p75)

“It dawned on me, as I watched the three older women together, that they had known each other since they were at Laurinda – and that perhaps they had even been the Cabinet of their day.” (p169) 

“And with those words, it hit me that she was the only adult here who knew what I was really capable of … Mrs Grey appreciated that my ambitions were larger than even I had recognised … She was the only person in this room who had peered into my heart and recognised my dark and secret need to be acknowledged.” (p334)