The Thorn Birds

Theme:

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough and A. Ward, the themes mainly attract readers’ attention are the great love story between Meggie Cleary – a beautiful, tough woman and Ralph de Bricassart – an ambitious Catholic priest, and (or) an inevitable tragedy resulted from the conflict between the love for God and that for man.

Summary:

According to McCullough, the thorn bird spends its entire life tirelessly searching for a thorn tree. Once the tree is located, the thorn bird impales itself on its thorns and sings a beautiful song as it dies. McCullough adds that this is the first and only time that the thorn bird will sing.

Famous Quotes:

• Love and hate are cruel, only liking is kind
• There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone’s heart.
• I hate being on my best behavior. It brings out the absolute worst in me.
• Belief doesn’t rest on proof or existence…it rests on faith…without faith there is nothing.
• It’s a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice
• If you love people, they kill you. If you need people, they kill you. They do I tell you!
• The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.
• Perfection, in anything, is unbearably dull. Myself, I prefer a touch of imperfection.
• How frightening, that one person could mean so much, so many things.
• What was sleep? A blessing, a respite from life, an echo of death, a demanding nuisance?
• That’s the purpose of old age… To give us a breathing space before we die, in which to see why we did what we did.
• We’re working-class people, which means we don’t get rich or have maids. Be content with what you are and what you have.
• The bird with the thorn in its breast, it follows an immutable law; it is driven by it knows not what to impale itself, and die singing. At the very instant the thorn enters there is no awareness in it of the dying to come; it simply sings and sings until there is not the life left to utter another note. But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it.