Top 100 Richard Flanagan Quotes
#1. Dorrigo glimpsed a complex mud of intimacies normally invisible to the world - the shared sleep, scents, sounds, the habits endearing and frustrating, the pleasures and sadnesses, small and large - the plain mortar that finally renders two as one. Her hair was pulled back
Richard Flanagan
#2. My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.
Richard Flanagan
#3. Darky was always looking for the good thing, no matter how small, and consequently he often found it.
Richard Flanagan
#4. In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.
Richard Flanagan
#5. Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it's seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don't share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit.
Richard Flanagan
#6. If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour, it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast, it is a political question.
Richard Flanagan
#7. The enslavement, humiliation, torture, and ultimate destruction of thousands upon thousands of human beings for a project for which there was ultimately no purpose is a horror that's very hard to imagine, far less understand.
Richard Flanagan
#8. It's like life, isn't it? You think you'll outrun it, that you're better than it, but it makes a fool of you every time. It runs you into the ground and steams off whistling away, happy as buggery with itself.
Richard Flanagan
#9. All men were liars and he was no doubt no different - only one tongue and more tales than the dog pound.
Richard Flanagan
#10. Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not.
Richard Flanagan
#11. Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than what we have been told. Maybe evolution has been going on in reverse longer than I suspect, and we are already sad, dumb fish.
Richard Flanagan
#12. It is not that you know nothing about war, young man ... It is that you have learnt one thing. And war is many things.
Richard Flanagan
#13. ... being true to the multitudes within himself that are one and many.
Richard Flanagan
#14. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage.
Richard Flanagan
#15. In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.
Richard Flanagan
#16. I was one of six kids; my grandmother lived with us. We had an aunt who used to have nerves, and all her kids would turn up and live with us.
Richard Flanagan
#18. And how if she didn't see him for another thirty years she would still love him, how she would still love him if he was dead until she was dead too.
Richard Flanagan
#19. His fame seemed to him a failure of perception on the part of others.
Richard Flanagan
#20. I think it's always wrong of writers to make too much of the pains of their labors, because most people have much worse jobs and suffer such indignities and hardships.
Richard Flanagan
#21. A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.
Richard Flanagan
#22. History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.
Richard Flanagan
#23. My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.
Richard Flanagan
#24. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.
Richard Flanagan
#25. Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.
Richard Flanagan
#26. And so he poured himself with renewed determination into her arms, into her conversations, into her fears and jokes and stories, hoping that this intimacy would finally smother all memory of Amy Mulvaney.
Richard Flanagan
#27. I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.
Richard Flanagan
#28. Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist.
Richard Flanagan
#30. I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.
Richard Flanagan
#31. A murderer's light spilled out from the sunset. It flooded William Street with its ruddy glow and ran beneath the blue-black hail clouds and up the boulevard like hot blood.
Richard Flanagan
#33. A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.
Richard Flanagan
#34. There was no meaning in it, not then and now now, but you can't write that, can you?
Richard Flanagan
#35. What you're constantly seeking isn't a style, but a transparency between your soul and the words. And your soul is ever in flux, so therefore you have to constantly find new forms of words that might be able to register these changes in the soul.
Richard Flanagan
#36. He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf.
Richard Flanagan
#37. Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo.
Richard Flanagan
#38. Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were not the centre of things, yet life was no less where you were.
Richard Flanagan
#40. He could never admit to himself that it was death that had given his life meaning.
Richard Flanagan
#41. I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.
Richard Flanagan
#42. He fell asleep and again dreamt of being rowed by two myrtle trees, except this time they rowed through the stars to the moon, and it was quiet, and while everything went on forever the stars were as knowable and as safe and as comforting a world as that of the rainforested rivers.
Richard Flanagan
#43. I had begun with the comforting conclusion that books are the tongue of divine wisdom, and had ended only with the thin hunch that all books are grand follies, destined forever to be misunderstood.
Richard Flanagan
#44. The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men in suits, whereas that doesn't happen in books. You just go and write, and then the book comes out.
Richard Flanagan
#45. On his death bed, the eighteenth-century haiku poet Shisui had finally responded to requests for a death poem by grabbing his brush, painting his poem, and dying. On the paper Shisui's shocked followers saw he had painted a circle.
Richard Flanagan
#46. I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.
Richard Flanagan
#48. No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pretending otherwise is the road to hell.
Richard Flanagan
#49. Being prisoner great shame. Great! Redeem honour building railway for Emperor. Great honour. Great!
Richard Flanagan
#50. The new music, the bebop and modern jazz, wasn't music to him. It was choppy noise pretending to make music out of traffic jams.
Richard Flanagan
#51. I love all forms of music. I even like music I dislike, because the music you dislike is like going to a strange country, and it forces you to rethink everything and to appreciate its particular joys.
Richard Flanagan
#52. From that woman on the beach, dusk pours out across the evening waves. ISSA
Richard Flanagan
#53. You can spend a day in a library and feel: 'Great, I've done a day's work.' But it's only research, not writing.
Richard Flanagan
#54. Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines.
Richard Flanagan
#55. The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles.
Richard Flanagan
#56. For Amy, love was the universe touching, exploding within one human being, and that person exploding into the universe. It was annihilation, the destroyer of worlds.
Richard Flanagan
#57. He read and reread 'Ulysses'. He looked back at Amy. They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said.
Richard Flanagan
#58. Like all immigrants, he seemed to have an unerring instinct for the oldest, truest words in his new language. The way he said the word, it felt free of the treacherous weight of mate
Richard Flanagan
#59. 'The Bradshaws' is the appropriately inappropriate English title given to an enigma - some hundreds of thousands of mysterious rock art paintings scattered through the wilds of the Kimberley, an area larger than Germany in the remote, scarcely populated northwest of Australia.
Richard Flanagan
#60. I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on.
Richard Flanagan
#61. What sort of soldier are you? she asked. Not much of one. Using his book, he tapped the triangular brown patch with its inset green circle sewn on his tunic shoulder. 2/7th Casualty Clearing Station. I'm a doctor. He
Richard Flanagan
#62. It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words - all the words that did not say things directly - were for him the most truthful.
Richard Flanagan
#63. I realised that if I wished to write about the dark and not allow for hope, people would recognise it as false - because hope is the nub of what we are.
Richard Flanagan
#64. The number of those identifying as Aborigine in Tasmania rapidly rose in the late 20th century.
Richard Flanagan
#65. Railway fettler, and his family lived in a Tasmanian Government Railways
Richard Flanagan
#66. Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after.
Richard Flanagan
#67. He had the sourdough smell of age. His chest sagged into shrivelled teats; his lovemaking was unreliable, yet she found it strangely wholesome in a way that defied sense.
Richard Flanagan
#68. Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.
Richard Flanagan
#69. And this grey spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Richard Flanagan
#70. It did not mean those things he had been told it meant, that the soldier could now rest, that his job was done. What job? Why? How could anyone rest?
Richard Flanagan
#72. He would live to see people praised for things that were not worthy of praise, simply because truth was seen to be bad for their feelings.
Richard Flanagan
#73. John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.
Richard Flanagan
#74. Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.
Richard Flanagan
#75. I shall be a carrion monster, he whispered into the coral shell of her ear, an organ of women he found unspeakably moving in its soft, whorling vortex, and which always seemed to him an invitation to adventure. He very softly kissed her lobe.
Richard Flanagan
#76. Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation & reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults & is easily ivied over with paid praises
Richard Flanagan
#77. You see, reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is unquestionable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man's reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life. Fyodor Dostoevsky
Richard Flanagan
#78. They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet.
Richard Flanagan
#79. For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence.
Richard Flanagan
#81. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.
Richard Flanagan
#82. The survival of extraordinary creatures such as the giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish - the largest in the world - is in doubt because of logging.
Richard Flanagan
#83. Cacophony of typewriter keys being pounded and typewriter carriages returning, phones ringing, men yelling and coughing, electric fans here and there droning as they hacked the unbearable heat into intolerable hot tufts.
Richard Flanagan
#84. In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.
Richard Flanagan
#86. She was full of yearning. To leave, to be someone else, somewhere else, to start moving and never stop. And yet the more the innermost part of her screamed to move, the more she recognised that she was frozen to one place, one life.
Richard Flanagan
#87. Realism is the embrace of disappointment, in order no longer to be disappointed. 4 "So I came to the city, my friend," the Doll then told Jodie, "what of it?
Richard Flanagan
#88. Stories as written are progressive, sentence must build upon sentence as brick upon brick, yet the beauty of this life in its endless mystery is circular. Sun & moon, spheres endlessly circling. Black man, full circle; white man, bisected circle; life, the third circle, on & on, & round & round.
Richard Flanagan
#89. I was struck by the way Europeans see history as something neatly linear. For me, it's not that; it's not some kind of straight railway.
Richard Flanagan
#90. He loved his family. But he was not proud of them. Their principal achievement was survival. It would take him a lifetime to appreciate what an achievement that was.
Richard Flanagan
#91. Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.
Richard Flanagan
#92. As they made their way to the coast, he bemoaned the hotel trade in the manner, Dorrigo felt, that those who love what they do bemoan their passion the most.
Richard Flanagan
#93. Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books.
Richard Flanagan
#94. In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.
Richard Flanagan
#95. Duty to his wife. Duty to his children. Duty to work, to committees, to charities. Duty to Lynette. Duty to the other women. It was exhausting. It demanded stamina. At times he amazed even himself.
Richard Flanagan
#96. The past is there, but life is circular. I have a strong sense of the circularity of time.
Richard Flanagan
#97. Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.
Richard Flanagan
#98. He reasoned that, as there was nothing he could do about his feelings, he must avoid acting on them.
Richard Flanagan
#99. A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.
Richard Flanagan
#100. An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.
Richard Flanagan
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