Top 300 Melina Marchetta Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 7

201. “How can someone who made me look this happy no longer be in my life.”

— Melina Marchetta

202. “But it’s the look in his eyes that I can’t help responding to, and I think to myself, forget the girlfriend. Just go for it. And I want to. But his girlfriend is there, a smiler, not a grinner.”

— Melina Marchetta

203. “Tom always did anger well. Hid it well, but showed it even better.”

— Melina Marchetta

204. “Words are intimacy she won’t allow and he would not dare ask for.”

— Melina Marchetta

205. “If I did something to hurt Frankie and she said that I was never getting near her heart again, I’d spent the rest of my life trying anyway. That’s the difference between you and me, Tom. I’d go back to the moment it all fell apart and I’d start there.”

— Melina Marchetta

206. “And I don’t know why, but I sit on that step until the last person’s gone home and I’m still grinning. Like someone who has a bit of a crush.”

— Melina Marchetta

207. “Finnikin’s head was bent low over the horse and he kicked its flanks hard and Froi had never clutched the body of one who felt so much but it reminded him of the time when he had tried to take Evanjalin in the barn. Both times the touch of their bodies had burned him, but this time something entered his bloodstream. Planted a seed.”

— Melina Marchetta

208. “This isn’t romance. This isn’t a declaration of love or affirmation of friendship. This is something more.”

— Melina Marchetta

209. “You’re a bully and I know you don’t care, but I just thought you should know that I think you’re scum. He’s probably some miserable kid with his own demons and he doesn’t need yours.”

— Melina Marchetta

210. “Little people irritate me. I felt like this monstrous giant alongside them.”

— Melina Marchetta

211. “You’re going to set us all on fire, you homicidal feral fruitcake.”

— Melina Marchetta

212. “No. We were jealous that Lirah had Gargarin. Cold, cold Lirah, who was bitter towards all men, loved my brother with all her heart. It made me hate her even more, because I knew this union was not one of the flesh. She hated the touch of men. He barely tolerated the touch of anyone. I couldn’t bear the idea of him loving someone as much as he loved me.” -Arjuro of Abroi.”

— Melina Marchetta

213. “Do you want to hang out? At your place or something?” Hanging out with Jimmy Hailler will mean that I have to say hello to him every day. I’m not ready to say hello to him every day. Too much commitment. It’s bad enough that I’m sharing chocolate brownies swith him. I shake my head. “Not today.”

— Melina Marchetta

214. “We didn’t let them do anything to us, Travanion,” Beatriss said fiercely, “They did it without out permission.”

— Melina Marchetta

215. “I recognise Santangelo’s dad, who saves police brutality for when he gets to his son.”

— Melina Marchetta

216. “Those full of fear were the most dangerous of people.”

— Melina Marchetta

217. “The silence accentuates the beauty of him. The beauty of this first boy of theirs.”

— Melina Marchetta

218. “My father believed in signs,’ she says. ‘Not that they change events or predict what’s going to happen. It’s more about what we do when we come across one.”

— Melina Marchetta

219. “I need desperately to feel it all, so when something wonderful happens, the contrast will be so massive that I will bottle the impact and keep it for the rest of my life.”

— Melina Marchetta

220. “Toto sits up, holding tight to the bar and staring out at the world. He drops a new toy that came with the pram and starts crying. Jimmy picks it up and crouches, looking into his caramel eyes. ‘I’m Jimmy,’ he whispers, ’and you’re the first thing I’ve ever sort of owned and I don’t want to get this wrong.”

— Melina Marchetta

221. “There are worse things than a lie and there are better things than the truth!”

— Melina Marchetta

222. “I love this school. I love how uncomplicated it is and the fact that we come from almost two hundred suburbs, so we have to work hard at finding something to hold us together.”

— Melina Marchetta

223. “Any man can kill, Finnikin. It is a stroke, an action with one’s hand. But not every man knows how to lead.”

— Melina Marchetta

224. “Everyone had told him to be strong for her, but Finnikin didn’t know how to be strong for himself.”

— Melina Marchetta

225. “And if I get a little chemically imbalanced in the head, like we all know I tend to get sometimes, and I don’t want my parents or brother knowing, Will’s like, ‘We’ll deal with it.’ He’s never said, ‘Snap out of it,’ and he’s never said, ‘I don’t get it,’ and he’s never said, ‘I’ll fix it up.’ He just says, ‘You’re not up to going back to uni to finish your Honors this year? Big deal. There’s next year. We’ll deal with it.’” She nods. “That’s what he does well.”

— Melina Marchetta

226. “Do you think I don’t want him to be gone more than you do? I do. Because I need to know that I can still breathe properly when he’s not around. If something happens to him, I have to know that I won’t fall apart...”

— Melina Marchetta

227. “Because I want to feel something other than this emotional crap.”

— Melina Marchetta

228. “Before I can finish, he turns away and sits down, his back to me, as if I was never there. I stare at the back of his head. There’s something about it that makes me want to commit a violent act with a blunt instrument.”

— Melina Marchetta

229. “And then their voices stopped and their souls stood still and they ceased being who they had been. Because who they were had always been determined by him.”

— Melina Marchetta

230. “It’s not as if he’s good-looking, because he’s not. Sometimes he’s so plain that he looks bland. But it’s his voice and his mannerisms that fill him with some kind of color. I listen to his voice and its resonance hooks me in. The worry lines on his forehead, his expression when he twists his face into a smile, and the way his whole face lights up when he laughs those short bursts of laughter.”

— Melina Marchetta

231. “And for Narnie, hours without them went by, and then days, and then weeks. And in between those seconds and minutes and hours and day and weeks was the most acute sense of loneliness she’d ever experienced.”

— Melina Marchetta

232. “It’s not that I miss my mother. It’s just that I miss the idea of what one would be.”

— Melina Marchetta

233. “Do you belong to the king?” he asked, his voice husky. She gently placed his hand against the beating pulse of her heart. Always, always it beat out of control, and he held his hand to it until he felt it perfectly match his. “Yes, Finnikin,” she said. “I belong to the king. I will always belong to him.” And there lay the bittersweet despair of what awaited them in the Valley.”

— Melina Marchetta

234. “I want to tell him that deep down each time Hannah looked at him she was grateful it was him because Jude did something that the others didn’t. He came back for her.”

— Melina Marchetta

235. “An arm was instantly around his neck. A dagger to his throat. A savage growl in his ear. Sagra. How he missed her.”

— Melina Marchetta

236. “She told him that from this angle the treetops looked like cauliflower and she had once heard them beckon her to jump, promising her that if she did, they’d bounce her back in the air again. Some days, like today, he was petrified she’d listen to them.”

— Melina Marchetta

237. “And slowly the mornings begin to change. Nothing too friendly or exciting, but by the time I get to school, the sick feeling that I wake up with every morning disappears. Not for long, but enough to get me through the day.”

— Melina Marchetta

238. “There it was. Suddenly the strangeness of Quintana of Charyn’s face made sense. Because it was a face meant for laughing, but it had never been given a chance. It robbed Phaedra of her breath.”

— Melina Marchetta

239. “What are you so sad about? We’re going to know him for the rest of our lives.”

— Melina Marchetta

240. “Love’s easy. It kind of comes with the territory. But liking is another story.”

— Melina Marchetta

241. “We look at each other for a moment and for once I feel awkward. It’s not that I’m not into humility; I’ve just never had to practise it.”

— Melina Marchetta

242. “I would like to die of natural causes and not of boredom.”

— Melina Marchetta

243. “And then the Charynite last borns were lifting Quintana on their shoulders and the Lumaterans had Froi on theirs, and she was laughing and he thought he’d never seen her look so beautiful. And over everyone’s heads, Froi could see Gargarin and Arjuro staring up at her with their bittersweet smiles, and Froi imagined two boys with the same face all those years ago in a filthy cave beneath the swamps of Abroi, praying for a better life.”

— Melina Marchetta

244. “Well, I’m not sure what suspicious looks like. Sometimes when you come down the mountain and stand behind those trees, you look suspicious.”

— Melina Marchetta

245. “Strange? I don’t think that word comes anywhere near it. My troops are on an overnight camp three hundred kilometres away from here. I had to sleep at the Santangelo penitentiary for pre-pubescent girls.”

— Melina Marchetta

246. “Silence is not just about secrecy, Your Majesty. It is grief and it is shame.”

— Melina Marchetta

247. “And at last Finnikin understood why he had felt so sorrowful and silent these last few days. He knew how to be Finnikin of the Rock to Evanjalin of the Monts. But he had no idea who to be to Queen Isaboe.”

— Melina Marchetta

248. “You list the dead. You tell the stories of the past. You write about the catastrophes and the massacres. What about the living, Finnikin? Who honors them?”

— Melina Marchetta

249. “I think you’ll just have to wait for that Loser of the Month tiara a little while longer while I wear it, with pride, around my neighborhood.”

— Melina Marchetta

250. “If there was one weapon he had against these savages, it was not acknowledging their existence.”

— Melina Marchetta