A Town Like Alice Quotes
"It's no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness."
"I doubt if I slept more than five hours in any night."
"I like to think a bit before taking any precipitate action."
"I'm an old man now, I've made plenty of mistakes in my time."
"Japanese soldiers have no beds, no mosquito nets."
"You walk, easy journeys, not more than you can go each day."
"You do good things, obedience to orders, you will be very happy."
"The Imperial Japanese Army do not make war on womans and on childs."
"You put away proud thoughts, very bad thing."
"You walk now. Womans remaining here are beaten, beaten very bad."
"I had never entertained a lady in that flat before except my daughters-in-law."
"I've never seen an opera in my life. I don't even know what happens."
"Life went on as before in the accounts office, but the children now had nightmares of death to follow them to sleep."
"Perhaps not go to camp at all, if they do good things, perhaps live in homes."
"Japanese soldiers always kind to womans and to childs."
"I want to go back to Malaya, Mr Strachan. To dig a well."
"Armed with money from the women she went down to the village again and got four dozen more, and presently all the women and children were in mango up to their ears."
"This time the delay was chiefly due to Mrs Collard."
"Somebody went to fetch some water, and bathed her face, and she said, 'Thank you, dear. Give some of that to Harry and Ben, there's a dear.'"
"They illustrated their meaning with pantomime."
"They wrote JULIA COLLARD on it and the date of death with an indelible pencil, hoping it would survive the rain."
"Captain Yoniata appeared again about an hour before sunset."
"People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had."
"By the time they reached Port Dickson their clothes were in a deplorable condition."
"He had carried their children willingly and he had wept when children died."
"Every soul shall taste of death, and we will prove you with evil and with good for a trial of you, and unto us shall ye return."
"If you be kind towards women and fear to wrong them, God is well acquainted what ye do."
"Once a man falls into the power of the Japanese it is not easy for him to escape and come back to his home."
"We are in your hands. If you say, go upon your way and walk on to some other place, then we must go, and going we must die."
"The death of the sergeant left them in a most unusual position, for they were now prisoners without a guard."
"I don't believe Mat Amin is the man to take that risk. There isn't any reason why he should."
"We could grow our own food, perhaps. Half the paddy fields we walked by coming in haven't been planted this year."
"I had a scunner of it, then-in 1945. We were all dying to get home."
"It's all right when you know what they mean. They're just like English names. Bahru means New, and Kota means a fort. It's only Newcastle, in Malay."
"I always wondered what had happened to her. What's she doing now?"
"She's a shorthand typist again, working in a handbag factory at Perivale."
"But if she hadn't been with them, all those women and children would have died."
"You won't know if it was wasted until you come to an end of your life. Perhaps not then."
"They were so very kind to us. They couldn't have been nicer, within the limits of what they are and what they've got."
"I want feeding up. I don't know if you know it, but I've been very ill."
"Think I'm the kind of man to take a girl out and let her shout?"
"Things get a bit mixed up sometimes," he observed.
"She ceased to write as an Englishwoman living in a strange, hard, foreign land; she gradually began to write about the people as if she was one of them, about the place as if it was her place."
"I cannot expect to have many more years left in which to travel and see the world. I would like to take a long holiday and travel a little before I get too feeble."
"It's a fact, there's something like a hundred girls and married women under twenty-five in Willstown now."
"It's no great shakes yet, of course, but it's better than Croydon, oh my word it is."
"The old have their place and the young have theirs."
"Leave-takings are stupid things, and best forgotten about as quickly as possible."
"It is no small matter to assist in the birth of a new city."