"My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It's about the most important thing I own."

"It's time for us to take charge of our heads again, to be brave, to do the things we have to do. That's the only way we can hold our heads up, walk proud. We've got to block out those thoughts of bullets and blood and pain. What happens, happens. But every time we panic, we weaken ourselves. Every time we think brave, we make ourselves stronger."

"Most of all I felt pretty happy that day. It was because we were starting to get on well again. It only showed in little ways, but those little ways were my food, my drink, my air, my life. The others thought I was tough and independent, but I needed those five people more than I'd ever needed anyone or anything in my entire existence."

"I wanted to be remembered as someone who built things, not someone who wrecked them."

"We didn’t know of course that you can’t prepare for luck and coincidence."

"Action is its own kind of thinking. We had to fight now: these people were a cancer who had crept into our stomachs and infected us all. We had to be surgeons, bold and clever, not thinkers and talkers."

"I felt as much at home here as the possums and wombats and galahs. Let no stranger intrude here, no invader trespass. This was ours, and this we would defend."

"As for me, my mind was so crowded that thoughts were being squeezed out of my ears. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find them dripping from my nostrils."

"None of us are vegetarians – being a vegetarian is a capital offence in our part of the world."

"Seems like since that night I’ve done less of everything: less sleeping, less eating, less talking. I feel I’m less of a person because I killed a dying soldier and that now I do less living."

"Can you believe those other countries won’t do anything for us?"
"Well, seems to me there were a few countries overseas who were invaded and we didn’t do anything about them."
"I thought we were different. I thought everyone loved us."
"I guess they only liked us. There’s a major difference between like and love."

"He was right, there’s a difference between the way you feel before you know a person and the way you feel after. I’d had those rushes of heat that I’d thought were love, when you see someone so beautiful you want to follow them for the rest of your life, just so you can keep staring at them. That kind of love didn’t mean much."

"The future is ... I don’t know, what’s the future? It’s a blank sheet of paper and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held and the lines we draw aren’t the lines we wanted."

"The death of one thing can be the birth of something else. I felt new determination, new surety, new confidence."

"Better to be in chains with the people you love than lonely and free."

"I thought how strange it was that to destroy something, and to kill people, was a great achievement, and I thought how strange it was that to destroy something, and to kill people, was a great achievement, and I thought how much easier it was to destroy than to build."

"For all they knew, we were professional soldiers, highly trained killers. For all I knew, we were. Maybe that’s what we’d become."

"Sometimes you just have to be brave. You have to be strong. Sometimes you just can’t give in to weak thoughts. You have to beat down those devils that get inside your head and try to make you panic. You struggle along, putting one foot a little bit ahead of the other, hoping that when you go backwards it won’t be too far backwards, so that when you start going forwards again you won’t have too much to catch up."