Shannon > Books: 2020‎ (36)

"I need you to be quite clear on how I feel about a highway and a bridge that gets them here in forty-five minutes from airport to door, with a great big slip lane and traffic noise day and night. This bridge is my nightmare. I won't stop fighting. Everyone laughs and says don't we know we're beaten. But I'm not beaten. [...] We're trying to protect the only thing Tasmania really has going for it in the twenty-first century. Its isolation. Its quiet. Its lack of population. Its remoteness. We need fewer people with more money coming here. [...] this bridge is a dumb strategy." [101]

"The world is a machine that feeds on people. There's always a cost. There are always broken marriages and messed-up children. Happiness - simple happiness - maybe it doesn't really exist anymore. Not in the world I saw, anyway. When it did happen, it was fleeting at best. Somewhere in the great rushing wind of conflict, refugees, climate change and capitalism, it had dissipated. It would be easy to blame capitalism but it wasn't just capitalism. It was this idea that everyone had a God-given right to live as they pleased. Now, in the US, there was a righteous, well-armed underbelly wearing their brown shirts and creeping deeper into America's psyche while the Democrats might as well have been talking underwater." [p.48]