Top 300 Melina Marchetta Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “But grieving people are selfish. They won’t let you comfort them and they say you don’t understand and they make you feel useless when all your life you’ve been functional to them.”

— Melina Marchetta

52. “Josie, life is not a Mills and Boon book. People fall out of love. People disappoint other people and they find it very hard to forgive.”

— Melina Marchetta

53. “I’m scared I’m going to spend the rest of my life in a state of yearning, regardless of where I am.”

— Melina Marchetta

54. “I never thought meeting you would be this boring. I thought we’d put our Italian emotion into gear and scream the place down. I never expected indifference.”

— Melina Marchetta

55. “Do you love me?’ he asked instead. ‘Because if you don’t, I’d wait until you did. I’d wait weeks and months and years.”

— Melina Marchetta

56. “It’s too late. Seventeen-year-olds don’t need fathers. Oh god. I’m thirty-four years old and I need a father. I can’t even begin to think what my daughter needs.”

— Melina Marchetta

57. “The people I’m stuck with in my life now aren’t sucking the life out of me, they just suck.”

— Melina Marchetta

58. “Simple dreams are the hardest to come true.”

— Melina Marchetta

59. “Living is the challenge. Not dying. Dying is so easy. Sometimes it only takes ten seconds to die. But living? That can take you eighty years and you do something in that time.”

— Melina Marchetta

60. “Maybe memories should be left the way they are.”

— Melina Marchetta

61. “I would rather die than ever see you suffering this way. I don’t want you or any child I ever have or any woman I ever love to go through or feel what you’re going through, but it’s happened and I don’t know what to do.”

— Melina Marchetta

62. “She’s tired and leans her head on his shoulder, which is the resting place for all their heads, but when Justine and Siobhan and Francesca use his body so shamelessly he doesn’t feel the need to turn his head and press his mouth against their hair.”

— Melina Marchetta

63. “There’s not much you need to know about the world. Except how to use a sword and trust very few.”

— Melina Marchetta

64. “Some days are worse than others, my love, some days better than most.”

— Melina Marchetta

65. “The truth doesn’t set you free, you know. It makes you feel awkward and embarrassed and defenseless and red in the face and horrified and petrified and vulnerable.”

— Melina Marchetta

66. “She asked me what type of contraceptive I use. Underwear. Keeping it on prevents pregnancy.”

— Melina Marchetta

67. “You can’t think for other people. Nor can you feel for them or be them. They have to do that for themselves.”

— Melina Marchetta

68. “She was the most beautiful woman in the world. If she was alive I’d probably be a better person.”

— Melina Marchetta

69. “It makes me want to yell at the God that I wish I didn’t believe in. For hogging him all to himself. I want to say, You greedy God. Give him back. I needed him here.”

— Melina Marchetta

70. “And I hate him and love him and curse him and feel sorry for him, all at the same time.”

— Melina Marchetta

71. “The idea that God works in mysterious ways is rubbish. There’s nothing mysterious about his ways. They’re premeditated and slightly conniving, and they place you in an impossible situation.”

— Melina Marchetta

72. “I still wake with your name on my lips every morning.”

— Melina Marchetta

73. “This is what I know. I look like my father. My father disappeared when he was seventeen years old. Hannah once told me that there is something unnatural about being older than your father ever got to be. When you can say that at the age of seventeen, it’s a different kind of devastating.”

— Melina Marchetta

74. “Sometimes I feel like a junkie. One minute something happens in my life and I’m flying. Next minute I take a nose-dive and just as I’m about to hit the ground with full force something else will have me flying again.”

— Melina Marchetta

75. “Somehow, even in the worst of times, the tiniest fragments of good survive. It was the grip in which one held those fragments that counted.”

— Melina Marchetta

76. “Never underestimate the value of knowing another’s language. It can be far more powerful than swords and arrows.”

— Melina Marchetta

77. “I’m not interested in those who do me wrong. There’s not enough time in the day for them.”

— Melina Marchetta

78. “We just have to learn to meet each other halfway okay?”

— Melina Marchetta

79. “People with lost personalities will suffer a great deal more than those with lost virginities.”

— Melina Marchetta

80. “I’m sick and tired of you people living interstate and overseas from people you want to be with. You’re ruining my life! All of you!”

— Melina Marchetta

81. “It’s Thursday afternoon, and we have sports. These are the choices for the girls: watching an invitational cricket game; studying in one of the classrooms; or watching the senior rugby league. As you can imagine, I’m torn.”

— Melina Marchetta

82. “A home to come back to every day of their lives. Where they would all belong or long to be. A place on the Jellicoe Road.”

— Melina Marchetta

83. “She thinks she knows who I am because she thinks who I am is who she tells me I am.”

— Melina Marchetta

84. “The two horsewomen of the apocalypse still win, despite their dwindling numbers.”

— Melina Marchetta

85. “At home, at our most vulnerable, she’s Mummy. When we’re talking to other people she’s Mum, but in my head she’s just Mia because I’ve been angry at her so many times that I’ve wanted to distance myself from her.”

— Melina Marchetta

86. “I think I’m a bit in love with these girls. They make me feel giddy. Like I haven’t a care in the world. Like I’m fearless. Like I used to be.”

— Melina Marchetta

87. “He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Okay, would you like pizza?” “I don’t think you deserve my company but I feel sorry for you so I’ll say yes.” “God help me,” he said, half under his breath.”

— Melina Marchetta

88. “Mama says that satisfaction isn’t what I should search for. Respect is. Respect? I detest that word. Probably because in this world you have to respect the wrong people for the wrong reasons.”

— Melina Marchetta

89. “Beatriss looked away, fighting tears. She gripped their hands. “I’m forgetting what the truth is, friends,” she said. “We were here, Lady Beatriss. We saw it all, so when you forget what the truth is, you come to us and we’ll remind you.”

— Melina Marchetta

90. “I’m very disturbed to find out that the leader of the Townies has a soul and I’m beginning to develop a bit of a crush on him.”

— Melina Marchetta

91. “I think that we vote, not to get the best party in, but to keep the worst party out.”

— Melina Marchetta

92. “What is it? A prize or something? No. It’s not a prize and I’m not a prize. But it’s mine. It belongs to me and I can only give it away once, and I want to be so sure when it happens. I don’t want to say that the first time for me was bad or it didn’t mean a thing.”

— Melina Marchetta

93. “Wives can replace their husbands, Georgie,” her aunt once told her. “But sisters can’t replace their brothers.”

— Melina Marchetta

94. “It was strange to have his parents needing something from him. Something this big. In the past, they needed silence from him if he was making a racket. They needed him to apply himself. “I need you to be sensible, Tom.” But not this need. Not the need to make everything right.”

— Melina Marchetta

95. “Fifteen minutes later I was an expert. That’s all you need. I think I was even getting the upper hand, which is very simple with a guy. Anything seems to turn them on.”

— Melina Marchetta

96. “Best way to find the weakness of the enemy is to understand their ways.”

— Melina Marchetta

97. “I’ve been passionate about two things in my life. One was Christina Alibrandi. The other is Josephine Alibrandi.”

— Melina Marchetta

98. “They separate us into groups. The Ringleaders and the Others. I belong to the Ringleaders because my weak, pathetic, traitorous, fundamentally base peers point to me when someone asks them who is in charge.”

— Melina Marchetta

99. “You just have to belong. Long to be.”

— Melina Marchetta

100. “As I walk back to the school on my own, I realise I’m crying. So I go back to the stories I’ve read about the five and I try to make sense of their lives because in making sense of theirs, I may understand mine.”

— Melina Marchetta