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918ee27 A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Richard Flanagan
57fca4c A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else. Richard Flanagan
633f9f6 There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything. words literature reading Richard Flanagan
4c40301 He believed books had an aura that protected him, that without one beside him he would die. He happily slept without women. He never slept without a book. Richard Flanagan
44eeb9f The path to survival was to never give up on the small things. Richard Flanagan
57025b1 In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. past Richard Flanagan
adaf89b Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause. virtue vanity Richard Flanagan
03aeab5 A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound. words literature reading Richard Flanagan
3f25d43 Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not. Richard Flanagan
fe08a18 And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space - was treated with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter - pleasure, joy, friendship, loved - was deemed somehow peripheral. Richard Flanagan
682cd88 She was full of yearning. To leave, to be someone else, somewhere else, to start moving and never stop. And yet the more the innermost part of her screamed to move, the more she recognised that she was frozen to one place, one life. Richard Flanagan
7eaba24 He loved his family. But he was not proud of them. Their principal achievement was survival. It would take him a lifetime to appreciate what an achievement that was. Richard Flanagan
9b514b1 For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence. Richard Flanagan
73220ad No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pretending otherwise is the road to hell. Richard Flanagan
47cd22b So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary--how am I to resolve them? life Richard Flanagan
10aad51 How empty is the world when you lose the one you love Richard Flanagan
7975259 Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage. Richard Flanagan
fdc8937 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. Richard Flanagan
7b6601f He pulled out a book here and there, but what kept catching his attention were the diagonal tunnels of sunlight rolling in through the dormer windows. All around him dust motes rose and fell, shimmering, quivering in those shafts of roiling light. He found several shelves full of old editions of classical writers and began vaguely browsing, hoping to find a cheap edition of Virgil's , which he had only ever read in a borrowed copy. It wasn.. Richard Flanagan
68e28d3 He thought of how the world organises its affairs so that civilisation every day commits crimes for which any individual would be imprisoned for life. And how people accept this either by ignoring it and calling it current affairs or politics or wars, Richard Flanagan
c97291f The God way. Talking about God this and God that. 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 being here and for not saving the men burning on the fucking bamboo. Richard Flanagan
900d4b0 It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible. It's believing in reality that does us in every time. Richard Flanagan
fa358ad And in the deepest recesses of his being, Dorrigo Evans understood that all his life had been a journeying to this point when he had for a moment flown into the sun and would now be journeying away from it forever after. Richard Flanagan
444ad2c It was a fabled railway that was the issue of desperation and fanaticism, made as much of myth and unreality as it was to be of wood and iron and the thousands upon thousands of lives that were to be laid down over the next year to build it. But what reality was ever made by realists? Richard Flanagan
d6331bc Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to. Richard Flanagan
c3d3d5e She took a puff, put the cigarette in the ashtray and stared at it. Without looking up, she said, But do you believe in love, Mr Evans? She rolled the cigarette end around in the ash tray. Do you? Outside, he thought, beyond this mountain and its snow, there was a world of countless millions of people. He could see them in their cities, in the heat and the light. And he could see this house, so remote and isolated, so far away, and he had a.. Richard Flanagan
27bebe2 Amy, amante, amour, he whispered, as if the words themselves were smuts of ash rising and falling, as though the candle were the story of his life and she the flame. He lay down in his haphazard cot. After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding. Love is two bodies.. Richard Flanagan
d30141d Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Richard Flanagan
ae45ac6 Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him i.. change life growth Richard Flanagan
f871ac7 He could never admit to himself that it was death that had given his life meaning. Richard Flanagan
24edb93 I wrote. Something. Yes. And you were truthful. No. You weren't truthful? I was accurate. writing truth Richard Flanagan
628e4ec 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 odour of each other on waking; the trembling sound of each other's breathing when a child was unwell; the illnesses, the griefs and cares, the tendernesses, unexpected and unbidden--as if all this.. Richard Flanagan
64289cb To have been part of a Pharaonic slave system that had at its apex a divine sun king led him to understand unreality as the greatest force in life. And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter--professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space--was vested with the greatest significance, and e.. Richard Flanagan
dc624ef definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others. I had endured too much to be reduced to an idea. Onto that pyre I threw so many, many words - that entire untrue literature of the past which had shackled & subjugated my as surely as the spiked iron collars & leg locks & jagged basils & balls & chains & headshaving - that had so long denied me my free voice & the stories I n.. Richard Flanagan
a96036c 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. Richard Flanagan
687aadb For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created, greater than any god man worshipped, for it was the only true god. It was as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal. For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be era.. Richard Flanagan
5c2b2ea And when I had finished painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder & beauty left to go round as each fish was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking & plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming ever more impoverished of lo.. nature Richard Flanagan
0d61157 Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations--that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls. words literature reading writing Richard Flanagan
b39925c Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage. Richard Flanagan
6383739 Dorrigo Evans hated virtue, hated virtue being admired, hated people who pretended he had virtue or pretended to virtue themselves. And the more he was accused of virtue as he grew older, the more he hated it. He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause. Richard Flanagan
0108044 These days he relied on the increasingly fragile assumption that what he said was right, and what was right was what he said. Richard Flanagan
b292a45 Maybe we just get given our faces, our lives, our fates, our happiness and unhappiness. Some get a lot, some bugger all. And love the same. Like different glass sizes for beer. You get a lot, you get bugger all, you drink it and it's gone. You know it and then you don't know it. Maybe we don't control any of it. No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pre.. Richard Flanagan
f4ce075 They talked about fishing, food, winds and stonework; about growing tomatoes, keeping poultry and roasting lamb, catching crayfish and scallops; telling tales, jokes; the meaning of their stories nothing, the drift of them everything; the brittle and beautiful dream itself. Richard Flanagan
f9b7f5f But sometimes things are said and they're not just words. They are everything that one person thinks of another in a sentence. Just one sentence. Richard Flanagan
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