Richard Flanagan Quotes & Sayings

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 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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

He read books. He liked none of them. He searched their pages for Amy. She was not there. He went to parties. They bored him. He walked the streets, gazing into strangers' faces. Amy was not there. The world, in all its infinite wonder, bored him. He searched every room of his life for Amy. But Amy was not anywhere to be found. — 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

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

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

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

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

Panegyrics of a man they had never understood, — Richard Flanagan

A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. — 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

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

An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children. — Richard Flanagan

A writer should never mark the page with their own tears. — Richard Flanagan

Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books. — 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

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

They found him late that night. He was floating head-down in the benjo, the long, deep trench of rain-churned shit that served as the communal toilet. Somehow he had dragged himself there from the hospital, where they had carried his broken body when the beating had finally ended. It was presumed that, on squatting, he had lost his balance and toppled in. With no strength to pull himself out, he had drowned. — Richard Flanagan

From that woman on the beach, dusk pours out across the evening waves. ISSA — Richard Flanagan

My purpose holds, To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars until I die. — Richard Flanagan

His fame seemed to him a failure of perception on the part of others. — Richard Flanagan

Dorrigo, the children, her friends, and her wider family - they all existed for her as a way of divining the world. It was a far larger and more wondrous place with them than it was without them. If she hoped for the same love from Dorrigo, and if she was disappointed in her hope, she did not feel its absence as a reason not to love him. The problem was that she did. Her love was without reason and would never yield to reason. Though it longed for requital, her love in the end did not demand it.
But when he was away at night, she would lie awake, unable to sleep. And she would think of him and her and feel the most overwhelming sadness. She may have been a trusting woman but she was very far from a stupid one. She repeated his words and echoed his opinions not because she was without thoughts of her own, but because her nature was one that wished to live through others. Without love, what was the world? Just objects, things, light, darkness. — Richard Flanagan

How empty is the world when you lose the one you love — 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

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

Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans' earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blinding light and him toddling back and forth, in and out of its transcendent welcome, into the arms of women. Women who loved him. Like entering the sea and returning to the beach. Over and over. — Richard Flanagan

My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food. — Richard Flanagan

Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon. — 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

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

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

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

Auger-eyed woman's small stout form, outlining her — 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

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

death poem of Hyakka, — 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

-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

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

I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was looking past Amy's naked body, over the crescent line between her chest and hip, haloed with tiny hairs, to where, beyond the weathered French doors with their flaking white paint, the moonlight formed a narrow road on the sea that ran away from his gaze into spreadeagled clouds. It was as if it were waiting for him. — 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

I am the happiest writing and being with the people I love. — 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

To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping. — Richard Flanagan

My mother hoped I'd be a plumber. — 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

Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after. — Richard Flanagan

As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty. — Richard Flanagan

They together staggered through those days that built like a scream that never ended, a wet, green shriek Dorrigo Evans found perversely amplified by the quinine deafness, the malarial haze that meant a minute took a lifetime to pass and that sometimes it was not possible to recall a week of misery and horror. — Richard Flanagan

He had forgotten the sharp taste of stone dust that hung around the broken village houses, the dead skinny donkeys' smell and the dead wretched goats' smell, the broken terraces' smell and smashed olive groves' smell, the sour stench of high explosive, the heavy odour of spilled olive oil, all melding into a single smell he came to associate with human beings in trouble. — Richard Flanagan

Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books. — 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

They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet. — Richard Flanagan

And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space - was treated with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter - pleasure, joy, friendship, loved - was deemed somehow peripheral. — Richard Flanagan

It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia. — 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

I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself. — 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 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

Dorrigo Evans was unable to make head or tail of it. His tastes were in any case already ossifying into the prejudices of those who voyage far into classics in adolescence and rarely journey elsewhere again. He was mostly lost with the contemporary and preferred the literary fashions of half a century before - in his case, the Victorian poets and the writers of antiquity. — Richard Flanagan

I'm getting used to it now.
His moods, his unpredictable explosions, horrible words and terrible things spewing out of his mouth. When he comes into a room, I go out, not to make a point or anything, not loud like, but quiet as a mouse, hugging the wall so that he will not notice I was ever there. — 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

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

He ... discovered that people's goodwill was frequently in inverse relationship to their position ... — 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

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

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

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

The only people who believe in straight roads are generals & mail coach drivers. — 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

The path to survival was to never give up on the small things. — Richard Flanagan

Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few. — 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

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

There grew between him and Ella a conspiracy of experience, as if the raising of children, the industry of supporting each other in ways practical and tender, and the sum of years and then decades of private conversations and small intimacies - the odour of each other on waking; the trembling sound of each other's breathing when a child was unwell; the illnesses, the griefs and cares, the tendernesses, unexpected and unbidden - as if all this were somehow more binding, more important and more undeniable than love, whatever love was. — Richard Flanagan

A world of dew and within every dewdrop a world of struggle. ISSA — Richard Flanagan