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ffe5e70
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The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security--national, individual, spiritual--wasn't a bad joke being played on them by a bored and capricious destiny. To be told that there was no connection between then and now, that they didn't need to wear a black armband or have a bad conscience about their powe..
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social-justice
rich-and-poor
consumption
inequality
colonialism
psychology
tourism
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Richard Flanagan |
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a0eac5e
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And one thing, as they sometimes do, led not to another, but shattered a world.
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Richard Flanagan |
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85e8b86
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But what reality was ever made by realists?
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Richard Flanagan |
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67035f1
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A world of dew and within every dewdrop a world of struggle. ISSA
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Richard Flanagan |
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dd39c15
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In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as one fixed thing, a plaster death mask, which as soon as it was touched crumbled in his figures back into dust.
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time
loss
memory
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Richard Flanagan |
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fa30115
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When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.
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money
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Richard Flanagan |
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c9ee77d
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she, armed with both & abandoning the joys of reason that had meant so much to her as well as me, made a suitably advantageous marriage with an ironmonger with a face like an anvil & a soul like a slag, & so I never saw her freckles fade, her auburn hair dull, never had to watch our love turn to that non-colour, white. -pg 115
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Richard Flanagan |
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4905a54
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Under the influence of mercury, which he administered to himself daily as a salve for his syphilis, & laudanum, which he drank each evening in imprecisely measured amounts to enable him to sleep, because of all things, this brave man feared only his dreams, opiate-enhanced nightmares that gave him no respite & which always ended in flames from which he rose phoenix-like just before dawn each morning, to recommence building what was already ..
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life
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Richard Flanagan |
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c71bf06
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Memory's only like justice, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right.
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Richard Flanagan |
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3ca5137
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to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!
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Richard Flanagan |
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7b8bf79
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in the back seat the three now silent, soot-smeared children absorbed it all--the choking creosote stench, the roar of wind and flame, the wild rocking of a car being driven that hard, 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 la..
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Richard Flanagan |
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85a07ed
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Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than what we have been told. Maybe evolution has been going on in reverse longer than I suspect, and we are already sad, dumb fish.
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Richard Flanagan |
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fdd38db
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He felt more soft raindrops, saw bright-red oil against the brown mud, heard his mother calling again, but it was unclear what she was saying, was she calling him home or was it the sea? There was a world and there was him and the thread joining the two was stretching and stretching, he was trying to pull himself up that thread, he was desperately trying to haul himself back home to where his mother was calling. He tried calling to her but ..
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Richard Flanagan |
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898acc6
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Like all immigrants, he seemed to have an unerring instinct for the oldest, truest words in his new language. The way he said the word, it felt free of the treacherous weight of mate
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Richard Flanagan |
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4a17e70
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Because in the end history--like the Berlin Wall--shapes people, had shaped her, but would not in the end determine her, because in the end it cannot account for the great irrational--the great human--forces: the destructive power of evil, the redeeming power of love.
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Richard Flanagan |
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1cabea9
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He had the sourdough smell of age. His chest sagged into shrivelled teats; his lovemaking was unreliable, yet she found it strangely wholesome in a way that defied sense.
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Richard Flanagan |
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fa45933
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On his death bed, the eighteenth-century haiku poet Shisui had finally responded to requests for a death poem by grabbing his brush, painting his poem, and dying. On the paper Shisui's shocked followers saw he had painted a circle.
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Richard Flanagan |
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81253d8
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Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans' earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blinding light and him toddling back and forth, in and out of its transcendent welcome, into the arms of women. Women who loved him. Like entering the sea and returning to the beach. Over and over.
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light
welcome
church
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Richard Flanagan |
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7f89e4c
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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.
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Richard Flanagan |
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f7f4c11
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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.
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Richard Flanagan |
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7f20cfb
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Realism is the embrace of disappointment, in order no longer to be disappointed. 4 "So I came to the city, my friend," the Doll then told Jodie, "what of it?"
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Richard Flanagan |
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f758d1e
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He read and reread 'Ulysses'. He looked back at Amy. They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said.
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Richard Flanagan |
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b42b81d
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No, Colonel Kota replied, stepping backwards and flipping open his Kuomintang cigarette case to proffer another cigarette
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Richard Flanagan |
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71736e4
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They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.
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Richard Flanagan |
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865ea76
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Evans understood that if Nakamura chose, it would be indiscriminately and their number would include the sickest--and perhaps most likely the sickest, because they were of least use to Nakamura--and that all of them would die. If, on the other hand, he, Dorrigo, chose, he could pick the fittest, the ones he thought had the best chance of living. And most would die anyway. That was his choice: to refuse to help the agent of death, or to be h..
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Richard Flanagan |
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a542557
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Darky Gardiner loathed Tiny, thought him a fool and would do anything to keep him alive. Because courage, survival, love--all these things didn't live in one man. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.
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Richard Flanagan |
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9d4324f
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He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food preparation would be felt to be more than the reading of poetry; where excitement would come from paying for a soup made out of foraged grass. He had eaten soup made out of foraged grass in the camps; he preferred food.
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Richard Flanagan |
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eb28e00
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and how if she didn't see him for another thirty years she would still love him, how she would still love him if he was dead until she was dead too.
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Richard Flanagan |
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bbf45f1
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He looked at his foreword, written, as ever, in his customary green ink, with the simple, if guilty, hope that in the abyss that lay between his dream and his failure there might be something worth reading in which the truth could be felt.
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Richard Flanagan |
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6ceff7f
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They found him late that night. He was floating head-down in the benjo, the long, deep trench of rain-churned shit that served as the communal toilet. Somehow he had dragged himself there from the hospital, where they had carried his broken body when the beating had finally ended. It was presumed that, on squatting, he had lost his balance and toppled in. With no strength to pull himself out, he had drowned.
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Richard Flanagan |
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08ebbed
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One man's feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all.
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Richard Flanagan |
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1e0c07d
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The imprisoning scent of jasmine that always awakened in him a desire to flee.
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Richard Flanagan |
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e965315
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At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work--an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end.
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Richard Flanagan |
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7ece9a0
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The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.
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Richard Flanagan |
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0d6849a
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One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.
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Richard Flanagan |
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d62024d
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He remembered a joke he had heard in a Cairo cafe. A prophet in the middle of a desert tells a traveller who is dying of thirst that all he needs is water. There is no water, replies the traveller. Yes, the prophet agrees, but if there was you would not be thirsty and you would not die. So I will die, says the traveller. Not if you drink water, replies the prophet.
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Richard Flanagan |
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4a12187
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All men were liars and he was no doubt no different--only one tongue and more tales than the dog pound.
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Richard Flanagan |
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c12b812
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To die of old age...is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death. It is the last and extremist kind of dying. It encourages people to lead a life devoted to not dying, which is really another way of not living.
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Richard Flanagan |
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24573b5
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Refugees are not like you and me. They are you and me. That terrible river of the wretched and damned flowing through Europe is my family. And there is no time in the future in which they might be helped. The only time we have is now.
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syrian-refugee-quotes
syrian-war
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Richard Flanagan |
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fdec0f8
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Duty to his wife. Duty to his children. Duty to work, to committees, to charities. Duty to Lynette. Duty to the other women. It was exhausting. It demanded stamina. At times he amazed even himself.
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Richard Flanagan |
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974f587
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Darky was always looking for the good thing, no matter how small, and consequently he often found it.
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Richard Flanagan |
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5e2d50c
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He fell asleep and again dreamt of being rowed by two myrtle trees, except this time they rowed through the stars to the moon, and it was quiet, and while everything went on forever the stars were as knowable and as safe and as comforting a world as that of the rainforested rivers.
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Richard Flanagan |
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2acd00e
|
Because courage, survival, love--all these things didn't live in one man. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.
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love
survival
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Richard Flanagan |
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f4d7ac3
|
He was looking past Amy's naked body, over the crescent line between her chest and hip, haloed with tiny hairs, to where, beyond the weathered French doors with their flaking white paint, the moonlight formed a narrow road on the sea that ran away from his gaze into spreadeagled clouds. It was as if it were waiting for him.
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Richard Flanagan |