In Away, a summer holiday brings three families face to face with experiences they cannot leave behind. The most useful quotations help you explain contradictions: love can isolate, security can become control, and a performance can make honesty possible. Read each quotation in its full scene so that the technique connects to a developing character relationship, rather than becoming an isolated label.
Read our full text analysis and study guide alongside this quotation bank. Check punctuation in your classroom edition and choose evidence that answers the question rather than memorising a fixed essay.
Grief and the difficulty of sharing it
1. "I thought my heart would break. I had to wipe away tears."
Techniques: Emotive metaphor and first-person monologue. Coral describes her response to the school performance. The image of a breaking heart gives emotional pain a physical form, while the reference to tears makes it visible. Watching Tom brings her lost son into the present, showing how bereavement can change the meaning of an apparently ordinary encounter. Use this scene to connect individual memory with the public experience of theatre.
2. "I won't think about death... Death, war, loss -"
Techniques: Repetition, ellipsis and aposiopesis. Coral tries to exclude painful thoughts during her conflict with Roy. Her attempted refusal immediately names the very subject she wants to avoid. The broken ending makes the failure of emotional control audible, while the movement from death to war connects private mourning with collective history. This is stronger evidence of unresolved grief than a simple statement that she is sad.
3. "I feel it. I suffer for it."
Techniques: First-person repetition and short declaratives. Coral insists on the reality of her grief. The first-person declarative makes suffering a lived experience rather than a problem someone else can reason away. Its simplicity challenges the pressure to present an acceptable public response.
4. "ROY leans towards them and buries his face in the shells in CORAL'S hands."
Techniques: Symbolic prop, tactile imagery and non-verbal action. Roy responds to Coral through a stage direction in the final act. The shells carry the beach experience into the couple’s relationship, and Roy’s movement brings him into Coral’s way of expressing grief. An enacted gesture replaces the earlier pressure to behave normally. The audience sees a new form of connection without being told that loss has disappeared.
5. "Before you know it you've won two years in the army."
Techniques: Black humour, euphemism and irony. Rick describes the conscription lottery. The language of winning makes compulsory service sound like a prize, exposing the bitter gap between the expression and its consequences. Its casual delivery shows how national events intrude into ordinary expectations about youth and the future. Connect Rick’s uncertainty with Coral’s bereavement to link collective decisions to individual experience.
Love, concealment and the value of the present
6. "We don't look back and we don't look forward. We have this boy and we won't have him for long."
Techniques: Negative declarative and temporal motif. Harry explains his family’s response to Tom’s illness. The refusal of future-oriented thinking turns attention towards what remains available now. Read it as an emotionally necessary strategy rather than proof that the family feels no fear.
7. "In a funny kind of way we're happy. Even while we're very, very sad."
Techniques: Repetition and emotional paradox. Harry acknowledges sorrow alongside family happiness. Repetition gives grief weight without cancelling the joy surrounding it. The emotional contradiction is valuable evidence for arguing that human responses need not fit a single category.
8. "They don't know. That I know."
Techniques: Dramatic irony and fragmented dialogue. Tom tells Meg that his parents do not realise he understands his prognosis. The audience learns that protection works in both directions. Dramatic irony reveals the paradox that mutual care can keep people from speaking openly about an experience they already share.
9. "I'm going to get sick again. And I won't get better."
Techniques: Blunt declaratives, negative modality and dramatic revelation. Tom speaks openly to Meg about his prognosis. The second sentence removes the possibility of recovery that the first might leave open. His directness contrasts with the reassuring appearances maintained around him and makes knowledge a source of agency as well as pain. The scene shows that facing a limit does not mean controlling or overcoming it.
10. "Something to look forward to." / "Same for me."
Techniques: Parallel dialogue, temporal motif and dramatic irony. Tom and Harry discuss the family’s anticipation of the holiday. The answering phrase aligns Tom with the pleasure his mother anticipates. In the context of his illness, a familiar holiday expectation becomes a concentrated hope for time together. Analyse the emotional weight beneath the ordinary exchange rather than treating it as proof that the family is simply carefree.
Family control, class and independence
11. "I don't think anyone should give in for the sake of peace and quiet. I won't."
Techniques: Emphatic refusal and contracted syntax. Meg refuses to yield merely to keep the peace. The contracted negative gives her resistance a decisive rhythm. Use it to distinguish genuine harmony from a family arrangement maintained through one person’s silence.
12. "Sacrificed! Gone without. Gone through hardship so what happened to us will never happen to you."
Techniques: Sentence fragment and retrospective allusion. Gwen describes the hardship behind her expectations. The fragment condenses sacrifice into a grievance. It helps explain her investment in material security without excusing the way that investment narrows Meg’s freedom.
13. "Planning the holidays was as important to your mother as actually going away."
Techniques: Comparative syntax and temporal symbolism. The discussion of holiday planning concerns Tom’s family. Preparation is given the same importance as the trip itself, making anticipation an experience in its own right. For a family whose future is uncertain, planning gives time an emotionally sustaining shape. This complicates the idea that holidays matter only as an escape from difficult reality.
14. "The world is full of mad people... no ambition -"
Techniques: Hyperbole, evaluative diction and projection. Gwen judges other people at the beach. Her sweeping judgement reduces unfamiliar people to examples of disorder and failed ambition. The exaggeration reveals how strongly she depends on a controlled idea of respectable life. Compare this certainty with her subsequent vulnerability to show how encounters can expose the fears concealed by prejudice.
15. "There are a million things to do. I'll have to do it all, I expect."
Techniques: Hyperbole and self-characterising dialogue. Gwen presents herself as the family organiser. The exaggerated number magnifies her obligations until she appears indispensable. Her expectation that she must do everything makes resentment and control part of the same response. The line helps explain how a wish to secure family life can damage relationships when responsibility becomes a claim to authority.
Performance, transformation and an unresolved ending
16. "If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended"
Techniques: Shakespearean allusion and framing. The opening school production quotes Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This promise establishes a comic expectation that disorder can be repaired. Gow subsequently tests that expectation against illness and bereavement, experiences for which restoration cannot mean returning to an untouched past.
17. "The FAIRIES return and stage a spectacular storm, emptying the stage"
Techniques: Stage direction and visual symbolism. The storm is described in a stage direction. The physical removal of the previous setting makes disruption visible to an audience. Analyse this as stagecraft: the play strips away familiar arrangements before bringing the families into new contact.
18. "I cannot walk. I am afraid." / "I will show you how." / "I'm walking. I'm walking."
Techniques: Repetition, movement and play-within-a-play. Coral participates in the beach performance with Tom. The movement from fear to repeated first-person affirmation accompanies physical action, making change an embodied action rather than a claim reported afterwards. Theatre gives her a way to practise engagement with life while grief remains present.
19. "JIM goes to her and they embrace."
Techniques: Non-verbal stage direction. The final act uses a stage direction for Jim and Gwen. The gesture offers evidence of an altered relationship without demanding a speech that resolves every earlier conflict. In a drama essay, explain how an audience reads bodily action as well as dialogue.
20. "It is the struggle between man and nature, as well as between man and man, and between man and himself"
Techniques: Tricolon, metatheatre and Shakespearean intertextuality. Miss Latrobe introduces King Lear in the concluding school scene. The three-part statement moves from conflict with the environment to conflict with others and finally within the self. As a comment on a play inside Gow’s play, it encourages the audience to reconsider the families’ journeys through all three kinds of struggle. The ending therefore makes private experiences part of a broader dramatic inquiry rather than offering a simple happy resolution.
Turn evidence into an argument
Build each paragraph around a claim about human experience, then connect two or three moments that complicate that claim. Explain what the writer’s choices make the audience notice, and return to the exact wording of your question. These selections support close analysis; a quotation list cannot guarantee a mark.
