Quotes from Richard Flanagan

I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.

I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.

Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts.

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.

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.

Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.

In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.

What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.

Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.

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.

He could never admit to himself that it was death that had given his life meaning.

I wrote. Something. Yes. And you were truthful. No. You weren't truthful? I was accurate.

Dorrigo Evans hated virtue, hated virtue being admired, hated people who pretended he had virtue or pretended to virtue themselves. And the more he was accused of virtue as he grew older, the more he hated it. He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

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.

These days he relied on the increasingly fragile assumption that what he said was right, and what was right was what he said.

Things bled. They bled and bled and would not stop bleeding. There would be no dramatic end, she realised, only a slow withering […] bleeding and more bleeding.

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.

Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage.

Because in the end history—like the Berlin Wall—shapes people, had shaped her, but would not in the end determine her, because in the end it cannot account for the great irrational—the great human—forces: the destructive power of evil, the redeeming power of love.

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.

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

she, armed with both & abandoning the joys of reason that had meant so much to her as well as me, made a suitably advantageous marriage with an ironmonger with a face like an anvil & a soul like a slag, & so I never saw her freckles fade, her auburn hair dull, never had to watch our love turn to that non-colour, white.

Memory's only like justice, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right.

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.