Quotes from 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

He waited for death as a traveller for a bus.

He understood that he shared certain features, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him. He'd just had more success at living than at dying

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

Suffering is not virtue, nor does it make virtue, nor does of it virtue necessarily flow.

A murderer's light spilled out from the sunset. It flooded William Street with its ruddy glow and ran beneath the blue-black hail clouds and up the boulevard like hot blood.

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.

He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf. But

You see, reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is unquestionable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man's reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life. Fyodor Dostoevsky

A man, good or bad, was magnificent. It was not possible that this thing that was nothing and would never change [death] could mean the end of everything that moved and changed within him - the good, the bad, the magnificent. Yet it did.

Non-freedom to the Western mind is inevitably linked with images of backwardness – Soviet tractors, East German Trabants, Kim Jong Il's haircut. But non-freedom these days is also iPads, iPhones and a dazzling array of less iconic but ubiquitous consumer goods that flood our stores, our homes and which increasingly are used to define our ideas of worth and happiness. It is a full-lipped smile achieved with the aid of collagen made from skin flensed from dead Chinese convicts.

The inescapable lesson of history is that any power given to the state – even when well meaning in intent – will ultimately be abused by the state. Like freedom, non-freedom does not arrive ready-made. It grows, and no soil should ever be made ready for its sowing.

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

You could never know when everything might change—a mood, a decision, a blanket. A life. They

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 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.

Even in Kyoto when I hear the cuckoo I long for Kyoto.

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.

He had come from the humblest of backgrounds, born in a cottage he had built with his own hands

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.

Please don't ask how I know such things, please: where fish are concerned I know everything - or as good as - & besides, it's rude to interrupt when I am in the middle of telling you how that sorry crumpled dory began to flare up

Fuck God, he had actually wanted to say. Fuck God for having made this world, fucked be His name, now and for fucking ever, fuck God for our lives, fuck God for not saving us, fuck God for not fucking being here and for not fucking saving the men burning on the fucking bamboo.

I just wanted to tell a story of love & it was about fish & it was about me & it was about everything

Billy Gould has always felt if something was worth doing, it was worth doing badly. Worry about doing it too well, he believed, & you may well be crippled by your ambition

His mode of speaking was largely incomprehensible, his tone was portentous, which is perhaps why he inevitably spoke in capital letters. Words existed in his speech as currants in a badly made bread-and-butter pudding - clusters of stodgy darkness