Quotes from Richard Flanagan

He did not believe he was unique or that he had some sort of destiny. In his own heart he felt all such ideas were a complete nonsense, and that death could find him at any moment, as it was now finding so many others. Life wasn't about ideas. Life was a bit about luck. Mostly though, it was a stacked deck. Life was only about getting the next footstep right.

Rock to gravel to dust to mud to rock and so the world goes, as his mother used to say when he demanded reasons or explanation as to how the world got to be this way or that. The world is, she would say. It just is, boy.

He was not a good surgeon, he was not a good doctor; he was not, he believed in his heart, a good man. But he refused to stop trying.

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

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.

Because not to fear was to imagine a world beyond experience. And that was too much for anybody.

It is not that you know nothing about war, young man, Dorrigo Evans had said. It is that you have learnt one thing. And war is many things.

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

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.

As the cards fluttered to earth, as everyone's hand was revealed as worthless, as every point won was shown to be a pointless charade, she would tell them how wonderful this other man was, 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. But instead she watched as Harry Robertson played the right bower, and he and Keith, who always played as partners, won the hand.

In the end all that was left was the heat and the clouds of rain, and insects and birds and animals and vegetation that neither knew nor cared. 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. Decades

She sometimes wondered, Francie continued, if parents' mistake was to make too much of their importance to their children, and their children repeat the same mistake.

Because courage, survival, love—all these things didn't live in one man. 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.

Speedo, when they worked us seventy days and

The lie was that postponing death was life. That wicked lie had now imprisoned Francie in a solitude more absolute and perfect and terrifying than any prison cell.

We dine on destruction: idyllic worlds reduced to industrial complexes that toil to the thud of dirty diesels day and night keeping millions of tortured fish alive with chemicals and dubious feed products; we sup on people's lives destroyed by noise and official contempt.

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

My dad used to say, you young never carry your weight.

He was your cobber? 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.

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.

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

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.

People kept on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only.

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.