Quotes About Richard Flanagan

I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.

Things bled. They bled and bled and would not stop bleeding. There would be no dramatic end, she realised, only a slow withering […] bleeding and more bleeding.

Memory's only like justice, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right.

for a moment he wondered:what if this had all been a mask for the most terrible evil? The idea was too horrific to hold on to.

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

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

What was a prisoner of war anyway? Less than a man, just material to be used to make the railway, like the teak sleepers and steel rails and dog spikes.

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.

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.

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

Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.

I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.

It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.

You can be very successful but still struggling financially, and it looked like I'd have to take a year or two off and find whatever menial labouring work you can get as a middle-aged, unskilled bald man.

War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.

There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.

My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.