Top 100 Richard Flanagan Quotes
#1. These days he relied on the increasingly fragile assumption that what he said was right, and what was right was what he said.
Richard Flanagan
#2. 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
#3. He whispered into the coral shell of her ear, an organ of women he found unspeakably moving in its soft, whirling vortex, and which always seemed to him an invitation to adventure.
Richard Flanagan
#4. There was, he knew, within him, hidden deep and far away, a great slumbering turbulence he could neither understand nor reach, a turbulence that was also a void, the business of unfinished things.
Richard Flanagan
#5. I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.
Richard Flanagan
#6. 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
#7. Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.
Richard Flanagan
#8. 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
#9. My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.
Richard Flanagan
#10. I wrote. Something. Yes.
And you were truthful.
No.
You weren't truthful?
I was accurate.
Richard Flanagan
#11. Adversity brings out the best in us ... It's everyday living that does us in.
Richard Flanagan
#12. The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.
Richard Flanagan
#13. History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.
Richard Flanagan
#14. The journey is long, the road is dark and frightening, but together we can reach our destination: the Tasmania of which we all dream, where all are welcome and all prosper, made no longer of lies but truth, built not of rich men's hate but our love for our island and for each other.
Richard Flanagan
#15. I hate the way my life has been inexplicably overwhelmed by questionnaires. Life is so much stranger and so much more beautiful than the lists that reduce it to an anorexic assembly of tics and obsessions.
Richard Flanagan
#16. One man's feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all.
Richard Flanagan
#17. So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary - how am I to resolve them?
Richard Flanagan
#18. A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.
Richard Flanagan
#19. 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
#20. When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.
Richard Flanagan
#21. If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It's almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other.
Richard Flanagan
#22. His fame seemed to him a failure of perception on the part of others.
Richard Flanagan
#23. In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.
Richard Flanagan
#24. 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
#26. I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.
Richard Flanagan
#27. I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.
Richard Flanagan
#28. 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
#30. To control the deaths of others - when, where, the craft of ensuring it was a cleanly sliced ending - that was possible. And in some strange way, such killing felt like controlling whatever remained of his own life.
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
#32. I had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you're fortunate enough to reach my age, to still be writing, you have to be grateful, and I am. I've been lucky. For many years, all I've done is writing, and it's all I've ever wanted to do.
Richard Flanagan
#33. Family matters, friends matter, love matters. Those you love and who love you matter. That's what writing does - it allows you to say all those things.
Richard Flanagan
#34. It had been a day to die, not because it was a special day but because it wasn't, and every day was a day to die now, and the only question that pressed on them, as to who might be next, had been answered.
Richard Flanagan
#35. A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.
Richard Flanagan
#36. Since woodchipping began 32 years ago, Tasmanians have watched as one extraordinary place after another has been sacrificed. Beautiful places, holy places, lost not only to them, but forever.
Richard Flanagan
#37. He understood the measure of his life now to be his capacity to believe in something - anything - other than what was happening in front of him. So they saw, but they did not see; so they heard, but they did not hear; and they knew, they knew it all, but still they tried not to know.
Richard Flanagan
#38. For a moment he wondered:what if this had all been a mask for the most terrible evil? The idea was too horrific to hold on to.
Richard Flanagan
#39. For the rest of his life he would yield to circumstance and expectation, coming to call these strange weights duty.
Richard Flanagan
#40. A Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, who does believe in climate change, nevertheless advised her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, to abandon his emissions trading scheme.
Richard Flanagan
#41. We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.
Richard Flanagan
#43. The story enchanted me, and I took to carrying the book with me everywhere, as if it were some powerful talisman, as if it contained some magic that might somehow convey or explain something fundamental to me.
Richard Flanagan
#44. I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.
Richard Flanagan
#45. Memory's only like justice, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right.
Richard Flanagan
#46. 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
#47. Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age - perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent - who painted them, what they mean.
Richard Flanagan
#49. The only accusation of Gillian Triggs with the ring of truth is that she has lost the confidence of the government - but then, so too has Tony Abbott.
Richard Flanagan
#50. Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist.
Richard Flanagan
#51. In the end you're not made or broken by prizes. Your relationship is with your readers, not a prize, and you just have to keep on honoring that.
Richard Flanagan
#52. 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
#53. I am the happiest writing and being with the people I love.
Richard Flanagan
#54. In this world we walk on the roof of hell gazing at flowers.
Richard Flanagan
#55. War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.
Richard Flanagan
#56. Every death of those you love is the death also of so many shared memories and understanding, of a now irretrievable part of your own life.
Richard Flanagan
#57. I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.
Richard Flanagan
#58. 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
#59. Pushing away, pushing in: the pattern of so much that was to follow.
Richard Flanagan
#60. When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.
Richard Flanagan
#61. She seemed a series of slight flaws best expressed in a beauty spot above her right lip. And he understood that the sum of all these blemishes was somehow beauty, and there was about this beauty a power, and that power was at once conscious and unconscious.
Richard Flanagan
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Nineveh, Tyre, a God-forsaken railway in Siam, Dorrigo Evans said, flame
Richard Flanagan
#65. In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.
Richard Flanagan
#66. What do the hieroglyphs tell us of what it was like to live under the lash, building the pyramids? Do we talk of that? Do we? No, we talk of the magnificence and majesty of the Egyptians. Of the Romans. Of Saint Petersburg, and nothing of the bones of the hundred thousand slaves that it is built on.
Richard Flanagan
#68. Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet - in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius.
Richard Flanagan
#69. Darky was always looking for the good thing, no matter how small, and consequently he often found it.
Richard Flanagan
#70. My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.
Richard Flanagan
#71. 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
#72. Ulysses'. No one reads him anymore. No one reads anything anymore. They think Browning is a gun.
Richard Flanagan
#73. A world of dew and within every dewdrop a world of struggle. ISSA
Richard Flanagan
#74. God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
Richard Flanagan
#75. What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.
Richard Flanagan
#76. It was one of those Hobart spring nights, cold as charity, snow coming down hard on the mountain, the harbour a lather, sleet slapping and scratching at windows and tin roofs like a wild drunk who's been locked out.
Richard Flanagan
#77. He understood that he shared certain features, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him. He'd just had more success at living than at dying,
Richard Flanagan
#78. I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.
Richard Flanagan
#79. No, Colonel Kota replied, stepping backwards and flipping open his Kuomintang cigarette case to proffer another cigarette
Richard Flanagan
#80. There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.
Richard Flanagan
#81. It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia.
Richard Flanagan
#82. 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
#83. In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.
Richard Flanagan
#84. 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
#85. After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.
Richard Flanagan
#86. We like love - we love love - but perhaps its only meaning lies in its ubiquitous meaninglessness. We apprehend it, we feel it, and we think we know it, yet we cannot say what we mean by it.
Richard Flanagan
#87. ... being true to the multitudes within himself that are one and many.
Richard Flanagan
#88. You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.
Richard Flanagan
#89. Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few.
Richard Flanagan
#90. I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.
Richard Flanagan
#91. Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.
Richard Flanagan
#92. He thought of how the world organises its affairs so that civilisation every day commits crimes for which any individual would be imprisoned for life. And how people accept this either by ignoring it and calling it current affairs or politics or wars,
Richard Flanagan
#93. Darky ate slowly, enjoying every morsel, his mouth salivating so wildly that he worried at the loud sloshing sound he made. But it was lost in all the other wet noises of the night.
Richard Flanagan
#94. 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
#95. You can be very successful but still struggling financially, and it looked like I'd have to take a year or two off and find whatever menial labouring work you can get as a middle-aged, unskilled bald man.
Richard Flanagan
#96. 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
#97. 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
#99. All men were liars and he was no doubt no different - only one tongue and more tales than the dog pound.
Richard Flanagan
#100. And they were deeply moved not so much by the poetry as by their sensitivity to poetry; not so much by the genius of the poem as by their wisdom in understanding the poem; not in knowing the poem but in knowing the poem demonstrated the higher side of themselves and of the Japanese spirit -
Richard Flanagan
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