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But what reality was ever made by realists? They -- Richard Flanagan
It was a fabled railway that was the issue of desperation and fanaticism, made as much of myth and unreality as it was to be of wood and iron and the thousands upon thousands of lives that were to be laid down over the next year to build it. But what reality was ever made by realists? -- Richard Flanagan
The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan - Kevin07 - exceeded in its banality only by its success. -- Richard Flanagan
And this grey spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. -- Richard Flanagan
We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
He believed books had an aura that protected him, that without one beside him he would die. He happily slept without women. He never slept without a book. -- Richard Flanagan
A world of dew and within every dewdrop a world of struggle. ISSA -- Richard Flanagan
Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
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
I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself. -- Richard Flanagan
In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children. -- Richard Flanagan
Railway fettler, and his family lived in a Tasmanian Government Railways -- Richard Flanagan
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
I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
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
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
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
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
My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way. -- Richard Flanagan
'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
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
I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes. -- Richard Flanagan
The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel. -- Richard Flanagan
Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations - that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls. -- Richard Flanagan
There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it. -- Richard Flanagan
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
There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
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
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
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
His fame seemed to him a failure of perception on the part of others. -- Richard Flanagan
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
My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing he ever knew. -- Richard Flanagan
Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English. -- Richard Flanagan
Darky was always looking for the good thing, no matter how small, and consequently he often found it. -- Richard Flanagan
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
The past is there, but life is circular. I have a strong sense of the circularity of time. -- Richard Flanagan
My secret skill is baking bread. My mother was a farmer's daughter and still made bread every day when I was a child. She would have me knead the dough when I got home from school. -- Richard Flanagan
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
And one thing, as they sometimes do, led not to another, but shattered a world. -- Richard Flanagan
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
He read and reread 'Ulysses'. He looked back at Amy. They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said. -- Richard Flanagan
And in the deepest recesses of his being, Dorrigo Evans understood that all his life had been a journeying to this point when he had for a moment flown into the sun and would now be journeying away from it forever after. -- Richard Flanagan
Nineveh, Tyre, a God-forsaken railway in Siam, Dorrigo Evans said, flame -- Richard Flanagan
Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after. -- Richard Flanagan
Vassals of an outdated ideology unrelated to the real world, they can, when questioned on this issue, only mumble neoliberal mantras that have delivered the world economic stagnation, rising inequality and global environmental crisis -- Richard Flanagan
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
My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died. -- Richard Flanagan
I think writing should be about change. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
where is truth to be found -- Richard Flanagan
How empty is the world when you lose the one you love -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
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
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
'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689. -- Richard Flanagan
I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes. -- Richard Flanagan
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
In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact. -- Richard Flanagan
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
Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss. -- Richard Flanagan
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
Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity. -- Richard Flanagan
The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs. -- Richard Flanagan
My disgraceful, wicked heart, thought Amy, is braver than the world. For a moment it seemed to Amy that there was nothing in the world she could not meet and vanquish. And though she knew this to be the most foolish idea, it excited and emboldened her further. -- Richard Flanagan
He ... discovered that people's goodwill was frequently in inverse relationship to their position ... -- Richard Flanagan
I do not come out of a literary tradition. -- Richard Flanagan
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
Logging is an industry driven solely by greed. It prospers with government support and subsidies, and it is accelerating its rate of destruction, so that Tasmania is now the largest hardwood chip exporter in the world. -- Richard Flanagan
Being prisoner great shame. Great! Redeem honour building railway for Emperor. Great honour. Great! -- Richard Flanagan
Panegyrics of a man they had never understood, -- Richard Flanagan
I have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of being taken away. -- Richard Flanagan
What was a prisoner of war anyway? Less than a man, just material to be used to make the railway, like the teak sleepers and steel rails and dog spikes. -- Richard Flanagan
As a meteorite strike long ago explains the large lake now, so Amy's absence shaped everything, even when - and sometimes most particularly when - he wasn't thinking of her. -- Richard Flanagan
Even in Kyoto when I hear the cuckoo I long for Kyoto. -- Richard Flanagan
All life is only allegory and the real story is not here ... -- Richard Flanagan
I am part of all that I have met. -- Richard Flanagan
I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general. -- Richard Flanagan
A writer should never mark the page with their own tears. -- Richard Flanagan
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
I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
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
Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon. -- Richard Flanagan
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
I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
I am the happiest writing and being with the people I love. -- Richard Flanagan
In this world we walk on the roof of hell gazing at flowers. -- Richard Flanagan
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
The imprisoning scent of jasmine that always awakened in him a desire to flee. -- Richard Flanagan
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
From that woman on the beach, dusk pours out across the evening waves. ISSA -- Richard Flanagan
Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943. -- Richard Flanagan
I get more optimistic as I get older. -- Richard Flanagan
Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
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
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
Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one's words and one's soul. -- Richard Flanagan
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
I tried to write what I remembered of the day. It sounded terrible and noble all at once. But it wasn't any of those things. -- Richard Flanagan
He continued to believe that, like everything else in his life, it would be righted by the sheer force of his will -- Richard Flanagan
Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few. -- Richard Flanagan
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
They talked about fishing, food, winds and stonework; about growing tomatoes, keeping poultry and roasting lamb, catching crayfish and scallops; telling tales, jokes; the meaning of their stories nothing, the drift of them everything; the brittle and beautiful dream itself. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
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
The number of those identifying as Aborigine in Tasmania rapidly rose in the late 20th century. -- Richard Flanagan
The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
name is Markos, he said. But call me Marco. -- Richard Flanagan
Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books. -- Richard Flanagan
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
The only people who believe in straight roads are generals & mail coach drivers. -- Richard Flanagan
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
Speedo, when they worked us seventy days and -- Richard Flanagan
I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long - wisely, I felt - shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write. -- Richard Flanagan
Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other. -- Richard Flanagan
My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food. -- Richard Flanagan
A man, good or bad, was magnificent. It was not possible that this thing that was nothing and would never change [death] could mean the end of everything that moved and changed within him - the good, the bad, the magnificent. Yet it did. -- Richard Flanagan
Auger-eyed woman's small stout form, outlining her -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic. -- Richard Flanagan
Film is the art of turning money into light, and light into money. But it begins with money. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
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
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
The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or wonder or sorrow than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now. -- Richard Flanagan
Pushing away, pushing in: the pattern of so much that was to follow. -- Richard Flanagan
As he made his way, he ploughed his bare feet through the mud as a child, head bowed as a child, interested as a child neither in where he was going nor in what might happen next but only in the furrow his foot opened that vanished a moment later. -- Richard Flanagan
If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday - you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It's always small, but it's real. -- Richard Flanagan
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
He looked at his foreword, written, as ever, in his customary green ink, with the simple, if guilty, hope that in the abyss that lay between his dream and his failure there might be something worth reading in which the truth could be felt. -- Richard Flanagan
They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet. -- Richard Flanagan
I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me. -- Richard Flanagan
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
He had the sense that the gods was just another name for time, but he felt that it would be as stupid to say such a thing as it would be to suggest that against the gods we can never prevail. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
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
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
My purpose holds, To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars until I die. -- Richard Flanagan
Black Saturday reminded many Australians of what they know only too well: that of all the advanced economies, Australia is perhaps the one most vulnerable to climate change. -- Richard Flanagan
It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story. -- Richard Flanagan
... being true to the multitudes within himself that are one and many. -- Richard Flanagan
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
In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself. -- Richard Flanagan
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
I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
No, Colonel Kota replied, stepping backwards and flipping open his Kuomintang cigarette case to proffer another cigarette -- Richard Flanagan
Writing about sex at length is a bit like describing mastication at length. It's the causes and the consequences and the meaning of it that are interesting, not the anatomical descriptions. -- Richard Flanagan
All men were liars and he was no doubt no different - only one tongue and more tales than the dog pound. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
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
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
One man's feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all. -- Richard Flanagan
-to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries! -- Richard Flanagan
But sometimes [love] was just there: ... he was ... shocked to know he had been lucky to live and know it, to love and be loved. -- Richard Flanagan
When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else. -- Richard Flanagan
There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything. -- Richard Flanagan
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
For much of the latter part of the 20th century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land of the 'fair go.' -- Richard Flanagan
You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully. -- Richard Flanagan
Without love, what was the world? -- Richard Flanagan
My mother hoped I'd be a plumber. -- Richard Flanagan
Ulysses'. No one reads him anymore. No one reads anything anymore. They think Browning is a gun. -- Richard Flanagan
God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions. -- Richard Flanagan
A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel. -- Richard Flanagan
What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness. -- Richard Flanagan
I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it. -- Richard Flanagan
I grew up in a world that was clannish - old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families. -- Richard Flanagan
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
Memory's only like justice, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right. -- Richard Flanagan
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
You could never know when everything might change - a mood, a decision, a blanket. A life. They -- Richard Flanagan
I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you can write and how you can write about sex, has reached a certain weary terminus with Fifty Shades of Grey. -- Richard Flanagan
The sum of such chaos was that I seemed to be reading a book that never really started and never quite finished. -- Richard Flanagan
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
But sometimes things are said and they're not just words. They are everything that one person thinks of another in a sentence. Just one sentence. -- Richard Flanagan
He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf. -- Richard Flanagan
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
There was no meaning in it, not then and now now, but you can't write that, can you? -- Richard Flanagan
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
History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more. -- Richard Flanagan
Words are mostly used to keep us asleep, not to wake us. -- Richard Flanagan
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
Within white Australia, there was a growing movement for what was known as reconciliation - a movement that peaked with millions marching in 2000 to demand the government say sorry for past injustices. -- Richard Flanagan
Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath. -- Richard Flanagan
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
As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty. -- Richard Flanagan
He reasoned that, as there was nothing he could do about his feelings, he must avoid acting on them. -- Richard Flanagan
A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. -- Richard Flanagan
It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia. -- Richard Flanagan
He could never admit to himself that it was death that had given his life meaning. -- Richard Flanagan
We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
death poem of Hyakka, -- Richard Flanagan
Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage. -- Richard Flanagan
And every word sounded both a defence against what he truly felt and a betrayal of all that he was. -- Richard Flanagan
An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well. -- Richard Flanagan
Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books. -- Richard Flanagan
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
It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible...It's believing in reality that does us in every time. -- Richard Flanagan
The world is, she would say. It just is, boy. -- Richard Flanagan
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
I wrote. Something. Yes.
And you were truthful.
No.
You weren't truthful?
I was accurate. -- Richard Flanagan
Adversity brings out the best in us ... It's everyday living that does us in. -- Richard Flanagan
In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked. -- Richard Flanagan
Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts. -- Richard Flanagan
For the rest of his life he would yield to circumstance and expectation, coming to call these strange weights duty. -- Richard Flanagan
In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle. -- Richard Flanagan
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
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
Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted. -- Richard Flanagan
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading. -- Richard Flanagan
smell its acrid horsehair upholstery and stale flour, -- Richard Flanagan
The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in order to halt its spread before it turns the soul of a society septic. -- Richard Flanagan
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
One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil. -- Richard Flanagan
Thinking: The world is. It just is. -- Richard Flanagan
Once upon a time...long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us. -- Richard Flanagan
Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause. -- Richard Flanagan
People kept on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only. -- Richard Flanagan
The path to survival was to never give up on the small things. -- Richard Flanagan