Quotes from Richard Flanagan

It was a part he felt himself feeling his way into, and the longer it went on, the more the men around him confirmed him in his role. It was as if they were willing him into being, as though there had to be a Big Fella, and, having desperate need of such, their growing respect, their whispered asides, their opinion of him - all this trapped him into behaving as everything he knew he was not. As if rather than him leading them by example they were leading him through adulation.

and every word sounded both a defence against what he truly felt and a betrayal of all that he was.

Dorrigo felt a warm

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

good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

behind which the panting dog drooped like a dropped chamois. It was too hot to smoke, but he smoked his pipe anyway. The smoke wreathed a strange smile that Dorrigo later came to realise was fixed; determined to find the world cheery in spite of all the evidence life produced to the contrary.

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.

I am a part of all that I have met.

Life was a bit about luck. Mostly though, it was a stacked deck. Life was only about getting the next footstep right.

For beneath that delicate black powder something highly unusual was happening: the book's marbled cover was giving off a faint, but increasingly bright purple glow.

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.

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.

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

I'm afraid a lot of people have lost a lot of money over the years betting on me.

Film is the art of turning money into light, and light into money. But it begins with money.

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.

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.

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.

My mother hoped I'd be a plumber.

'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.

The survival of extraordinary creatures such as the giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish - the largest in the world - is in doubt because of logging.

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.

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

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.