Boy Swallows Universe Quotes

“Maybe we'd all be much more effective communicators if we all shut up more.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“Dormant true love, there for everybody, just waiting to be found, erupting when the thread of existence collides with chance and the eyes of two lovers meet. Boom. From what I’ve seen of it, true love is hard. Real romance has death in it. It has midnight shakes and flecks of shit across a bedsheet. True love like this dies if it has to wait for fate. True love like this asks lovers to cast aside what is meant to be and work with what is.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“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, Boy Swallows Universe

“Do your time before it does you.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“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, Boy Swallows Universe

“The downside is life is short and has to end. The upside is it comes with bread, wine and books.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“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, Boy Swallows Universe

“Slim’s always talking about this, the little movies within the movie of your own life. Life lived in multiple dimensions. Life lived from multiple vantage points. One moment in time – several people meeting at a circular dining table before taking their seats – but a moment with multiple points of view. In these moments time doesn’t just move forward, it can move sideways, expanding to accommodate infinite points of view, and if you add up all these vantage point moments you might have something close to eternity passing sideways within a single moment. Or something like that.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“True love like this asks lovers to cast aside what is meant to be and work with what is.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“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, Boy Swallows Universe

“Your end is a dead blue wren.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“Boy swallows past. Boy swallows himself. Boy swallows universe.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“The whole point of life is doing what’s right, not what’s easy.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“Don’t forget to be specific…Details. Put in all the details. The boys appreciate all that detailed daily life sh*t they don’t get anymore. If you’ve got a teacher you’re hot for, tell ‘em what her hair looks like, what her legs look like, what she eats for lunch. If she’s teaching you geometry, tell ‘em how she draws a bloody triangle on the blackboard. If you went down the shop for a bag of sweets yesterday, did you ride your pushee? Did you go by foot? Did you see a rainbow along the way? Did you buy gobstoppers or clinkers or caramels? If you had a good meat pie last week was it steak and peas or curry or mushroom and beef? You catchin’ my drift? Details.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“Most things people say don't need to be said.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“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, Boy Swallows Universe

“The dads in those tv shows spend a great deal of time talking to their kids in their living rooms. Steven Keaton - the dad of my dreams - seems to do nothing but sit on his couch or at his kitchen table talking to his children about their myriad teenage calamities. He listens and listens to his kids and he pours glasses of orange juice and hands them to his kids as he listens some more. He tells his kids he loves them by telling his kids he loves them. Dad tells me he loves me when he forms a pistol out of this forefinger and thumb and points it at me as he farts. He tells us he loves us by showing us the tattoo we never knew he had on the inside of his bottom lip: Fuck you.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“...hugging Dad back feels like the good thing to do and my hope is to grow into a good man, so I do it.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“Watch my language? Watch my language? This is what really shits me, when the clandestine heroin operation truth meets the Von Trapp family values mirage we've built for ourselves.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“Maybe we’d all be much more effective communicators if we all shut up more.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“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, Boy Swallows Universe

“...she knew there was hardship in this true love and endurance and reward and failure and renewal and, finally, death, but never regret.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“Do your time, before it does you”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“It’s about the ups and downs of life. The downside is life is short and has to end. The upside is it comes with bread, wine and books.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“Don't worry. A man can have many best friends and none any more or less best than the other.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“I was thinking that true character surely is best shown in hell, that true goodness must surely be best displayed in an underworld where the very opposite is the norm, when evil is living and goodness is an indulgence, you know what I’m saying?”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“Adult men. Fucking adult men. Nutters, all of them. Can’t be trusted. Fucking sickos. Freaks. Killers. What was this man’s road to becoming Batman on a side street of inner-city Brisbane? How much good was in him? How much bad? Who was his father? What did his father do? What did his father not do? In what ways did other adult men fuck his life up?”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“The human heart's default state is actually kindness.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“Darren says his mum told him a secret recently about Australians. She said this secret would make him a rich man. She said the greatest secret about Australia is the nation's inherent misery. Bich Dang laughs at the ads on telly with Paul Hogan putting another shrimp on the barbie. She said foreign visitors should rightfully be advised about what happens five hours later at that Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe