Quotes from Richard Flanagan

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

Being prisoner great shame. Great! Redeem honour building railway for Emperor. Great honour. Great!

railway fettler, and his family lived in a Tasmanian Government Railways

It was one of those Hobart spring nights, cold as charity, snow coming down hard on the mountain, the harbour a lather, sleet slapping and scratching at windows and tin roofs like a wild drunk who's been locked out.

Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation & reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults & is easily ivied over with paid praises

One small boy jumps over a table, pulls his jumper and shirt up, and turns his back to us to show where shrapnel wounded him when he was three. His classmates shriek with laughter.

My purpose holds, To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars until I die.

I tried to write what I remembered of the day. It sounded terrible and noble all at once. But it wasn't any of those things.

He read and reread 'Ulysses'. The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

There was no meaning in it, not then and now now, but you can't write that, can you?

To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping.

It did not fit with the new age of conformity that was coming in all things, even emotions, and it baffled him how people now touched each other excessively and talked about their problems as though naming life in some way described its mystery or denied its chaos.

As he made his way, he ploughed his bare feet through the mud as a child, head bowed as a child, interested as a child neither in where he was going nor in what might happen next but only in the furrow his foot opened that vanished a moment later.

threatening apes. What was this room? How could he get out? The green blindfold was now wrapping around his throat, choking him. His heart was pounding. He

Do we trust the idea of love, no matter how mad – from Don Quixote's love for the farm girl he renames Dulcinea del Toboso to Yossarian's love for the chaplain – because in the face of conformity, the madder the love, in some mysterious way the greater the commitment to freedom?

Thinking: The world is. It just is.

a belief in each other, a belief that they cleave to only more strongly when death comes. For if the living let go of the dead, their own life ceases to matter. The fact of their own survival somehow demands that they are one, now and forever.

The lie was one they - children, doctors, nurses - all encourage. 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.

Love is public,... or it's not love. Love is shared with others or it dies.

the heat, the emotion so raw and exposed it was like butchered flesh; the tormented, hopeless feeling of two people who lived together in a love not yet love, nor yet not; an unshared life shared; a conspiracy of affections, illnesses, tragedies, jokes and labour; a marriage—the strange, terrible neverendingness of human beings. A family.

Nothing endures. Don't you see, Bonox? That's what Kipling meant. Not empires, not memories. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.

Trecutul nu este soarta ta, singura iti faci viata, ca atunci cand conduci masina, fie incet, neriscand nimic, necastigand nimic, fie repede, cand tot ceea ce conteaza e ce ai in fata, in clipa asta, iar tot ce e in spate nu mai are relevanta.

intampina cu un zambet aproape tot ce spuneau ceilalti, in parte fiindca, in tinerete, descoperise ca asta ii usura drumul in viata, in parte fiindca era o masca, iar el gasea o mare placere in a-i insela pe ceilalti, castigandu-le increderea, convingandu-i ca n-au de ce sa se teama de el. Ca si tiganii, folosea mai multe masti: a vorbirii, a comportamentului, a personalitatii. Pentru ca, pe dedesubt, sa ramana el insusi.

It did not mean those things he had been told it meant, that the soldier could now rest, that his job was done. What job? Why? How could anyone rest?