Quotes from Richard Flanagan

And this grey spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Thus attired in the night of their grief, they prepared to depart into a morning she seemed determined not to relinquish.

I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species & phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish (201).

Words are mostly used to keep us asleep, not to wake us.

To control the deaths of others - when, where, the craft of ensuring it was a cleanly sliced ending - that was possible. And in some strange way, such killing felt like controlling whatever remained of his own life.

Philopon helps me through this fever, Nakamura said, feeling

It was as if words were now a wall between people rather than a bridge, and if you could just build the wall high enough no one would see the growing desert of the vanished on the other side. It was as though everyone was using words to avoid using words for what words were used for.

we wish we had never known.

After all, it wasn't food; it was survival.

It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words - all the words that did not say things directly - were for him the most truthful.

And all the time he knew it was his hunger eating him.

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.

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.

Stories as written are progressive, sentence must build upon sentence as brick upon brick, yet the beauty of this life in its endless mystery is circular. Sun & moon, spheres endlessly circling. Black man, full circle; white man, bisected circle; life, the third circle, on & on, & round & round.

What do the hieroglyphs tell us of what it was like to live under the lash, building the pyramids? Do we talk of that? Do we? No, we talk of the magnificence and majesty of the Egyptians. Of the Romans. Of Saint Petersburg, and nothing of the bones of the hundred thousand slaves that it is built on.

I'm getting used to it now. His moods, his unpredictable explosions, horrible words and terrible things spewing out of his mouth. When he comes into a room, I go out, not to make a point or anything, not loud like, but quiet as a mouse, hugging the wall so that he will not notice I was ever there.

Szcz??liwy cz?owiek nie ma przesz?o?ci, a nieszcz??liwy nie ma nic poza ni?

He read books. He liked none of them. He searched their pages for Amy. She was not there. He went to parties. They bored him. He walked the streets, gazing into strangers' faces. Amy was not there. The world, in all its infinite wonder, bored him. He searched every room of his life for Amy. But Amy was not anywhere to be found.

She always preferred strong lies to weak truths

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

The story enchanted me, and I took to carrying the book with me everywhere, as if it were some powerful talisman, as if it contained some magic that might somehow convey or explain something fundamental to me.

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 shall be a carrion monster, he whispered into the coral shell of her ear, an organ of women he found unspeakably moving in its soft, whorling vortex, and which always seemed to him an invitation to adventure.

From that woman on the beach, dusk pours out across the evening waves. ISSA