50 Important Quotes You Should Pay Attention to in ‘The Dressmaker’

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#11: They all started to cry, first slowly and quietly then increasing in volume. They groaned and rocked, bawled and howled, their faces red and screwed and their mouths agape, like terrified children lost in a crowd. They were homeless and heartbroken, gazing at the smouldering trail splayed like fingers on a black glove.

• Character: Tilly, Molly and Teddy 
• Technique: Fragmented phrases, cumulative listing 
• Chapter 33

#12: ‘They think I’m not doing you any good.’ Tilly handed Teddy her smoke. ‘Everyone likes to have someone to hate,’ she said.

• Character: Tilly
• Technique: Exaggeration
• Chapter 18

#13: “She wore a clinging black swaskin fishtail with a neckline that ended at her waist”

• Character: Tilly
• Technique: Symbolism, characterisation
• Chapter 29 

#14: “Tilly played loud music and they danced – an independent, jumping, goose-stepping twirl around the kitchen table” 

• Character: Tilly and Sergeant Farrat 
• Technique: Cumulative listing
• Chapter 29

#15: “Myrtle sat for the rest of the morning on the veranda where everyone in the whole town could see her” 

• Character: Tilly
• Technique: Symbolism of Myrtle vs Tilly
• Chapter 6

Molly Quotes

#16: She eats birdseed and fruit and other things she has sent from the city. She gets things from overseas too, from places I’ve never heard of. She mixes things up—potions—says they’re herbs, “remedial”, and she pretends to be an arty type, so why would she want to stay here? 

• Character: Molly 
• Technique: Anaphora, rhetorical question, symbolism
• Chapter 8 

#17: ‘ln this town a man can covet his neighbor’s wife and not get hurt, but to speak the truth can earn a bleeding nose.’

• Character: Septimus Crescent, to Molly
• Technique: Irony
• Chapter 15

#18: ‘Then when he couldn’t have his son anymore, I couldn’t have you.’

• Character: Molly, to Tilly 
• Technique: Repetition
• Chapter 26

#19: Molly wiped tears from her eyes and looked directly at Tilly. ‘I went mad with loneliness for you, I’d lost the only friend I had, the only thing I had, but over the years I came to hope you wouldn’t come back to this awful place.’ 

• Character: Molly, to Tilly 
• Technique: Repetition
• Chapter 26

#20: ‘Sometimes things just don’t seem fair.’

• Character: Molly, to Tilly
• Technique: Cliché
• Chapter 26

#21: ‘But you want them to like you,’ said Molly. ‘They’re all liars, sinners and hypocrites.’

• Character: Molly
• Technique: Irony
• Chapter 18

Sergeant Farrat Quotes

#22: Sergeant Farrat said love was as strong as hate and that as much as they themselves could hate someone, they could also love an outcast. 

• Character: Sergeant Farrat 
• Technique: Juxtaposition
• Chapter 19 

#23: Sergeant Farrat moved amongst his flock, monitoring them, listening. They had salvaged nothing of his sermon, only their continuing hatred.

• Character: Sergeant Farrat 
• Technique: Symbolism of Farrat as a shepherd, biblical allusion 
• Chapter 20 

#24: ‘Anyone can go, Beula, but only good people with respectful intentions should attend, don’t you think? Without Tilly’s tolerance and generosity, her patience and skills, our lives—mine especially—would not have been enriched. Since you are not sincere about her feelings or about her dear mother and only want to go to stickybeak—well it’s just plain ghoulish, isn’t it?’

• Character: Sergeant Farrat 
• Technique: Rhetorical question
• Chapter 27 

• #25: ‘Molly Dunnage came to Dungatar with a babe-in-arms to start a new life. She hoped to leave behind her troubles, but hers was a life lived with trouble travelling alongside and so Molly lived as discreetly as she possibly could in the full glare of scrutiny and torment.
  Character: Sergeant Farrat, about Molly and Tilly
• Technique: Exaggeration
• Chapter 27 

#26: Her heart will rest easier knowing Myrtle again before she died.

• Character: Sergeant Farrat, about Molly and Tilly
• Technique; Metaphor
• Chapter 27

#27: “His new checked gingham skirt hung starched and pressed on the wardrobe doorknob behind him.”

• Character: Sergeant Farrat 
• Technique: Symbolism
• Chapter 5 

#28: Then Sergeant Farrat left Tilly’s side to stand and deliver a sermon of sorts. He spoke of love and hate and the power of both and he reminded them how much they loved Teddy McSwiney. 

• Character: Sergeant Farrat 
• Technique: Dichotomy of love and hate
• Chapter 19

#29: “What’s the point of having a law enforcer if he enforces the law according to himself, not the legal law?”

• Character: Sergeant Farrat, Buela
• Techinque: Irony
• Chapter 5 

#30: “He paused a moment to run his hands over his nylon stockings and admire his new lace panties. Then he put on his navy trousers, socks and shoes.” 

• Character: Sergeant Farrat
• Technique: Juxtaposition, tricolon, symbolism
• Chapter 5 

 Marigold Pettyman and Evan Pettyman Quotes

#31: ‘l used to be sick, Evan, you used to make me sick, but Tilly Dunnage has cured me.’ 

• Characters: Marigold, to Evan 
• Technique: Declaration, repetition
• Chapter 28

#32: The ladies of Dungatar were polite to Councillor Pettyman – he was the shire president and Marigold’s husband. But they turned their backs when they saw him coming, busied themselves with a shop window or suddenly remembered something they had to do across the road. Men avoided the councillor but were cordial. 

• Character: Evan Pettyman 
• Technique: Irony, characterisation
• Chapter 6 

#33: Evan Pettyman stood over his wife’s bed and carefully poured thick syrup tonic into a teaspoon. 

• Character: Evan Pettyman 
• Technique: Irony, contrast between Evan drugging his wife and the seemingly caring gesture
• Chapter 6 

#34: “Why don’t you fall down Marigold, faint, have one of your headache fits – you’re insane” 

• Character: Evan Pettyman, to Marigold 
• Technique: Spiteful and dismissive tone
• Chapter 28

#35: Evan woke up depressed and moody. He checked his comatose wife in her cot, then lay down and conjured lewd images of Una, but the only thing he felt was an uneasy numbness…”

• Character: Evan Pettyman
• Technique: irony, descriptive language 
• Chapter 28

More Important Quotes from The Dressmaker

#36: ‘They’ve grown airs, think they’re classy. You’re not doing them any good.’

• Character: Teddy McSwiney, to Tilly
• Technique: Colloquial language
• Chapter 18

#37: He wasn’t able to offer any sense of anything from his own heart to them, no comfort, and he understood perfectly how Molly Dunnage and Marigold Pettyman could go mad and drown in the grief and disgust that hung like cob-webs between the streets and buildings in Dungatar when everywhere they looked they would see what they once had.

• Character: Edward McSwiney, Teddy, Tilly, Molly, Marigold Pettyman, Stewart Pettyman 
• Technique: Metaphor
• Chapter 19

#38: See where someone they could no longer hold had walked and always be reminded that they had empty arms. And everywhere they looked, they could see that everyone saw them, knowing.

• Character: Edward McSwiney, Teddy, Tilly, Molly, Marigold Pettyman, Stewart Pettyman 
• Technique: Metaphor, emotive language, repetition
• Chapter 19

#39: He said that Teddy McSwiney was, by the natural order of the town, an outcast who lived by the tip.

• Character: Edward McSwiney, Teddy, Tilly, Molly, Marigold Pettyman, Stewart Pettyman
• Technique: Tone (Inevitability, Acquiescence)
• Chapter 19

#40: His good mother, Mae, did what was expected of her from the people of Dungatar, she kept to herself, raised her children with truth and her husband, Edward, worked hard and fixed people’s pipes and trimmed their trees and delivered their waste to the rip. The McSwineys kept at a distance but tragedy includes everyone, and anyway, wasn’t everyone else in the town different, yet included?

• Character: Sergeant Farrat, Tilly, the McSwineys 
• Technique: Rhetorical question, highlights the town’s hypocritical nature
  Chapter 19 

#41: Trudy circled them, her seventeenth-century Baroque cast of the evil sixteenth-century Shakespeare play about murder and ambition.

• Character: Gertrude Pratt
• Technique: Intertextuality, irony, humour
• Chapter 30

#42: They queued on the tiny stage like extras from a Hollywood film waiting for their lunch at the studio canteen. 

• Character: Gertrude Pratt
• Technique: Irony, humour
• Chapter 30

#43: The girls in their short frocks with pinched waists, their hair stiff in neat circles, opened their pink lips wide and tugged self-consciously at their frothy skirts.

• Character: Tilly, Girls at the dance 
• Technique: Contras (Tilly vs. girls at the dance) 
• Chapter 9

#44: Winyerp sits smugly to the north of Dungatar in the middle of an undulating brown blanket of acres and acres of sorghum.
Character: N/A

• Technique; Personification
• Chapter 14

#45: The farms around Dungatar are golden seas of wheat, which are stripped, the header spewing the grain into semitrailers […] The wheat will become flour or perhaps it will sail to overseas lands. The famous Winyerp sorghum will become stock fodder. 

• Character: N/A
• Technique: Symbolism of the sorghum, irony (of Dungatar’s exports going further than the people in the town have ever been)
• Chapter 9

#46: Gertrude stepped out of her wedding gown and hung it on a coat hanger. She caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror an unremarkable brunette with quiver-thighs and unbeautiful breasts. She let the tea-colored silk negligee slide over her chilly nipples and looked in the mirror again. ‘I am Mrs. William Beaumont of Windswept Crest,’ she said.

• Character: Gertrude Beaumont
• Technique: Symbolism, Characterisation (Gertrude’s agency)
• Chapter 13

#47: The town will be quiet again and the children will go back to the creek to play. The adults will wait for football season. The cycle was familiar to Tilly, a map.
Character: N/A

• Technique: Truncated sentences, tricolon
• Chapter 9

#48: The people of Dungatar gravitated to each other. They shook their heads, held their jaws, sighed and talked in hateful tones. 

• Character: People of Dungatar 
• Technique: Tricolon
• Chapter 20

#49: She used to have a lot of falls, which left her with a black eye or a cut lip. Over the years, as her husband ground to a stiff and shuffling old man, her injuries ceased.
Character: Irma 

• Technique: Allegory (domestic abuse)
• Chapter 4

#50: The last champions from Dungatar to seize the football cup were now war verterans hiding next to radiograms in dim lounge rooms, but tomorrow they would leave their armchairs and drag their shell-shock, emphysema and prothestics to the white railing by the goalposts even if it killed them. 

• Character: The veterans 
• Technique: humour and tricolon
• Chapter 7