Top 40 Trent Dalton Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Love breeds love. Big or little, every gesture of love is as worthy and important as another. And maybe the small is actually not so small after all. Sometimes those little gestures are just as life-saving.”

— Trent Dalton

3. “I’m a good man,’ Slim says. ‘But I’m a bad man too. And that’s like all men, kid. We all got a bit o’ good and a bit o’ bad in us. The tricky part is learnin’ how to be good all the time and bad none of the time. Some of us get that right. Most of us don’t.”

— Trent Dalton

4. “The whole point of life is doing what’s right, not what’s easy.”

— Trent Dalton

5. “It feels like unrequited love, but it’s not because of someone not loving me. It’s that they’re not here anymore. It’s unrequited, but it’s not painful in the sense that I love someone and they don’t love me back. I love someone, I just can’t be with him because he’s not here anymore.”

— Trent Dalton

6. “Love is commitment,′ Zak says. ‘I don’t just mean commitment to a person, I mean commitment to making space for someone in your life and letting them grow and change inside that space and still loving them.”

— Trent Dalton

7. “Love is a river. Love is a mountain. Love makes you a mountaineer.”

— Trent Dalton

8. “Maybe we’d all be much more effective communicators if we all shut up more.”

— Trent Dalton

9. “Love is knowing when you’ve come home.”

— Trent Dalton

10. “Do your time before it does you.”

— Trent Dalton

11. “Boy swallows past. Boy swallows himself. Boy swallows universe.”

— Trent Dalton

12. “Your end is a dead blue wren.”

— Trent Dalton

13. “Love is the privilege of being with someone long enough that you’re gradually refining the truths that you tell each other. You feel safe enough to keep showing more and more of yourself to each other.”

— Trent Dalton

14. “The downside is life is short and has to end. The upside is it comes with bread, wine and books.”

— Trent Dalton

15. “Most things people say don’t need to be said.”

— Trent Dalton

16. “True love like this asks lovers to cast aside what is meant to be and work with what is.”

— Trent Dalton

17. “Never grow attached to anything you can’t instantly separate yourself from.”

— Trent Dalton

18. “To burn this house down or set the world on fire. Up to you, Eli.”

— Trent Dalton

19. “Hearts don’t turn to stone, Molly,” Greta says. “But they do turn. One day your heart is filled with nothing but love and then something gets inside and mixes in with all that love and sometimes that something is black and sometimes it’s cold and feels just like stone because it’s heavy, and sometimes it gets so heavy you can’t carry it inside you no more.”

— Trent Dalton

20. “The tilapia has been drowned in a garlic and chilli and coriander sauce, so many exposed white bones in its charred and thorny dorsal fin that they look like the ivory keys in the warped piano organ the devil plays in hell.”

— Trent Dalton

21. “August is one year older than me but August is one year older than everybody. August is one year older than the universe.”

— Trent Dalton

22. “Butterfly short life, Yukio says. But butterfly live forever... – he raises a single forefinger – in one day.”

— Trent Dalton

23. “Molly knows the secret to a long walk. Never think about the destination. Just think about the air in your lungs, the motion of your arms and legs. There is a rhythm to it, and once you have found it that rhythm can tick-tock through time forever.”

— Trent Dalton

24. “Love is lifting your heart up for the ones you love.”

— Trent Dalton

25. “Don’t fuckin’ swear.”

— Trent Dalton

26. “So that’s the catch of love. The hardest things inside us, the saddest things, stem from the best things inside us, the sweetest things.”

— Trent Dalton

27. “I’m not gonna kill myself. And we love him very much, which is only half as much as he loves us.”

— Trent Dalton

28. “You’re on the low side of love but that’s still love all the same. Maybe you’re lucky to have held a kind of love that makes you feel so low. Some folks feel no side of love at all.”

— Trent Dalton

29. “The human heart’s default state is actually kindness.”

— Trent Dalton

30. “He stares into my eyes and he tries to understand me and I think he does because he breathes and that’s what humans do. We breathe. And we think. But we get mad too. We get so sad and we get so mad.”

— Trent Dalton

31. “Love is helping others,’ he says. ‘You see someone sad, you lift them up. Buy ’em a cup of coffee. That’s what I do. Don’t leave someone at square one.”

— Trent Dalton

32. “Time, Slim. Changes faces. Changes stories. Changes points of view.”

— Trent Dalton

33. “Stay sweet, Eli Bell.”

— Trent Dalton

34. “Every day of your life has been leading up to tomorrow. But of course every day of your life led up to today.”

— Trent Dalton

35. “And time is up. Time is undoing. Time is undone.”

— Trent Dalton

36. “No, your marrow, boy. You are weak-boned. Your bones are hard but your bones are not full. He nodded at August. ‘Marcel Marceau’s bones are hard and they are also full. Your brother possesses a strength that you will never have.’ August shot a smug and knowing smile at me. ‘But I’ve got great finger bone strength,’ I said, flipping August the bird.”

— Trent Dalton

37. “And what role are you playing today, Molly? Greta asks. Or are you still working on that twelve-year-old gravedigger girl who has convinced herself she’s not being raised by monsters?”

— Trent Dalton

38. “The sun is in me now. The sun is my heart, and all the world – the fishermen in China and the corn farmers in Mexico and the fleas on the backs of the dogs in Kathmandu – relies on the rising and falling of my full heart.”

— Trent Dalton

39. “Don’t worry. A man can have many best friends and none any more or less best than the other.”

— Trent Dalton

40. “Sometimes when he’s drinking, he gets all weepy and he’ll ask me to come closer to him and he’ll ask me to hug him and it feels strange to hold him close to me but it feels good too, with his face hair rubbing like sandpaper against my softer cheeks and it’s strange and sad the feeling of sorrow I feel because I know he might not have actually been physically touched, except by accident, by another human for about fifteen years.”

— Trent Dalton

41. “I have a forgiveness weakness in me that I hate because it means I’d probably forgive the man who removed my heart with a blunt knife if he said he needed it more than me.”

— Trent Dalton