The Golden Age Flashcards
‘the world went on
no matter what was happening to you’.
‘they looked
‘they had no
‘they hadn’t tried
smaller to her’
power. They cared what other people thought’
to stick up for her, they hadn’t saved her’
‘the ghost like memory
of confinement, of helplessness’
‘can’t pick my nose
can’t scratch my balls or wipe my arse’
‘nowhere it seemed
was too remote for the polio virus to find you’
‘polio had taken his
‘he’d entered another world
legs, but given him his vocation: poet’
with Sullivan, an enchantment’
‘since the fever of polio had
subsided, light seemed less bright to him, older, sadder’
‘he could still sense that time
in the ceiling somewhere deep in his body’
‘They felt displaced…
Where did they belong? And to whom’
‘always going
‘desperate
to stand out’
to be normal’
‘to love a place, to
imagine yourself belonging to it, was a lie…it was vanity’
‘the children felt a sort of
guilt, even though they were long out of quarantine’
‘a light
had come on’
[Anne Lee, Return to Normal]
‘revealing himself as un-Australian.
For some reason this gave Warren pleasure’
Metalanguage, Barrett`
‘Ida wanted to go
straight back onto the ship’
‘he loved the freedom.
It was as if he’d been granted a reprieve from growing up’
‘as long as she
was there he didn’t have to fear’
[Parents, Ida/Frank]
‘Slowly I am
turning into someone else’
‘as if the old world
had finally taken its hands away from his eyes’
‘once you get used to
your condition… your imagination becomes free again’
‘the past seems very
far away’
[Sullivan/Meyer]
‘The children who celebrated Christmas
at the Golden Age seemed much happier than those who returned at bedtime exhausted, silentdistant and alone’
‘everything seemed like
an echo from an unrecoverable past’
[Meyer]
‘They’ve asked me to start
with that awful anthem’
‘Our anthem’
‘Never again
could the Golds be fooled by good fortune’
‘they never got her
‘she loved
wrong. Didn’t judge her’
freedom of choice’
‘forgotten
‘grown
and unloved’
apart from them’
‘once she belonged to
the word… now she belonged to Frank’
‘pang of
homesickness’
[What might have been, Frank/Elsa]
‘learn to be alone’
‘real life had always been
‘We die
Elsa without Parents, Difficult reality of Life
when he was alone’
alone’
‘we are
as tough as cockroaches’
[Survivors]
‘she missed him when he
he left the room. Everything was suddenly boring’
‘the rule was
‘her resoluteness was
nothing was ever too much for her’
apart of her, as if…she’d made a decision to be good’
’ he couldn’t unlearn
death, living with the closeness of its presence’
‘survival skills-
intuition, observation, experience’
‘prey to melancholy…
they take the weak ones first’
‘her father hovering
in case she fell, That would annoy her’
‘it was peaceful, the only time she felt
alone here. She had no pain. Her brain was dry and clear’
