Dorrigo Quotes & Sayings

As the prisoners' commanding officer and senior medical officer, Dorrigo Evans reported to Major Nakamura that four men had died the day before, two overnight, and that this left eight hundred and thirty-eight POWs. Of this eight hundred and thirty-eight, sixty-seven had cholera and were in the cholera compound, and another one hundred and seventy-nine were in hospital with severe illness. A further one hundred and sixty-seven were too ill for any work other than light duties. — Richard Flanagan

The genuine investor in common stocks does not need a great equipment of brain and knowledge, but he does need some unusual qualities of character — Benjamin Graham

After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding.
Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page.
But there was nothing - the final page had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding. There was no last page. The book of his life just broke off. There was only the mud below him and the filthy sky above. There was to be no peace and no hope. And Dorrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end. — Richard Flanagan

He was now a surgeon, and he assumed he would marry Ella, and though they had never spoken about it, he knew she did too. He thought that marrying Ella was another thing like completing his medical degree, receiving his commission, another step up, along, onwards. Ever since Tom's cave, where he had recognised the power of reading, every step forward for Dorrigo had been like that. — 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

The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel. — Richard Flanagan

Amy, amante, amour, he whispered, as if the words themselves were smuts of ash rising and falling, as though the candle were the story of his life and she the flame. He lay down in his haphazard cot. After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding. Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page. But there was nothing - the final pages had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding. There was no last page. The book of his life just broke off. There was only the mud below him and the filthy sky above. There was to be no peace and no hope. And Dorrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end. He would live in hell, because love is that also. — 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

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

What I really like about 'Red Band Society' is how real it is, and the experiences that they are going through are experiences that everyone is bound to go through at one point or another in their lives. — Ciara Bravo

He read and reread 'Ulysses'. He looked back at Amy. They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said. — Richard Flanagan

The most important person in the motion picture process is the writer ... and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from ever realizing it. — Irving Thalberg

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

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

My only idea ever, Dorrigo had confessed, is to advance forward and charge the windmill. Taylor had laughed, but Dorrigo had meant it. It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible, Squizzy, he had explained, in as close to an explanation of himself as he ever offered. It's believing in reality that does us in every time. He — Richard Flanagan

Nineveh, Tyre, a God-forsaken railway in Siam, Dorrigo Evans said, flame — 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

Many cities make music, but no city breathes music quite like Memphis. The songs and sounds that come from here are uniquely American. — Shawn Amos

He found in the time he was able to spend with Tom - by phone once a month and what became after a time an annual visit to Sydney in midwinter, and then, as his reputation grew and he travelled to Sydney more frequently - that special closeness that siblings sometimes have. It was an ease of company that allows for most things to be unsaid, for awkwardness and error to be entirely unimportant, and for that strange sense of a mysterious shared soul to be expressed through the most trivial of small talk. If beyond their blood relation they had almost nothing in common, Dorrigo Evans still increasingly felt with Tom that he was but one aspect of a larger thing, of which his brother was another, different but complementary part, and their meetings were not so much an assertion of self as a welcome dissolution of it in each other. — Richard Flanagan

It seems to me that there will be a point in out development or our evolution where you put your guns aside. — Bill Hicks

Evans understood that if Nakamura chose, it would be indiscriminately and their number would include the sickest - and perhaps most likely the sickest, because they were of least use to Nakamura - and that all of them would die. If, on the other hand, he, Dorrigo, chose, he could pick the fittest, the ones he thought had the best chance of living. And most would die anyway. That was his choice: to refuse to help the agent of death, or to be his servant. — 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