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b6b3bd0
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He had forgotten the sharp taste of stone dust that hung around the broken village houses, the dead skinny donkeys' smell and the dead wretched goats' smell, the broken terraces' smell and smashed olive groves' smell, the sour stench of high explosive, the heavy odour of spilled olive oil, all melding into a single smell he came to associate with human beings in trouble.
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Richard Flanagan |
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8361965
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And this sense, this feeling of communion, would at moments overwhelm him. 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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a1a7727
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lys llrjl ls`yd mD, 'm lrjl lHzyn flys ldyh shy akhr
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Richard Flanagan |
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e87cb28
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n lbshr lysw l wHdan mn 'shy kthyr@, wkl hdhh l'shy ttwq l'n t`ysh, wn '`l~ shkl mn 'shkl lHy@ hw lHry@: lHry@ fy 'n ykwn lrjl rjlan, wfy 'n tkwn lGym@ Gym@, wfy 'n ykwn lkhyzrn khyzrnan
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Richard Flanagan |
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d7000c2
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As the prisoners' commanding officer and senior medical officer, Dorrigo Evans reported to Major Nakamura that four men had died the day before, two overnight, and that this left eight hundred and thirty-eight POWs. Of this eight hundred and thirty-eight, sixty-seven had cholera and were in the cholera compound, and another one hundred and seventy-nine were in hospital with severe illness. A further one hundred and sixty-seven were too ill ..
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Richard Flanagan |
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cdffb73
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Her eyes burnt like the blue in a gas flame. They were ferocious things. For some moments her eyes were all he was aware of. And they were looking at him. But there was no look in them. It was as if she were just drinking him up. Was she assessing him? Judging him? He didn't know. Maybe it was this sureness that made him both resentful and unsure.
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Richard Flanagan |
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5ea301f
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Nowyisk ays aylandak kghzow aylandak ch`ap`anishnerov Yorgen Yorgensene, ork`an el or p`k`ver, havalowsni khghchowk mi kghkghank` er, erkar ow sowr ankyownnerov, karch asats, och` t`e mard, ayl vernahagowsti kangown kakhich`, ore p`ordzowm e hishel, t`e tariner arhaj inch` hagowst e ir kerhikits` enkel:
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Richard Flanagan |
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b498b55
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He continued to believe that, like everything else in his life, it would be righted by the sheer force of his will
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Richard Flanagan |
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b9957bb
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cacophony of typewriter keys being pounded and typewriter carriages returning, phones ringing, men yelling and coughing, electric fans here and there droning as they hacked the unbearable heat into intolerable hot tufts.
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Richard Flanagan |
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35c65a9
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My disgraceful, wicked heart, thought Amy, is braver than the world. For a moment it seemed to Amy that there was nothing in the world she could not meet and vanquish. And though she knew this to be the most foolish idea, it excited and emboldened her further.
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Richard Flanagan |
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bb76e32
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Maybe he doesn't really think it now. 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.
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Richard Flanagan |
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b167350
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It's like life, isn't it? You think you'll outrun it, that you're better than it, but it makes a fool of you every time. It runs you into the ground and steams off whistling away, happy as buggery with itself.
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Richard Flanagan |
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3aece65
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He reasoned that, as there was nothing he could do about his feelings, he must avoid acting on them.
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Richard Flanagan |
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4fb639b
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He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.
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Richard Flanagan |
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411e2c6
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And so he poured himself with renewed determination into her arms, into her conversations, into her fears and jokes and stories, hoping that this intimacy would finally smother all memory of Amy Mulvaney.
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Richard Flanagan |
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93eccb6
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Watching his brother, Dorrigo Evans had wondered what it was that would make a grown man cry. 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. Dorrigo Evans would live long enough to see all these changes. And he would remember a time when people were ashamed of crying...
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Richard Flanagan |
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bc7312b
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Ulysses'. No one reads him anymore. No one reads anything anymore. They think Browning is a gun.
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Richard Flanagan |
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6c5fdd6
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Dorrigo glimpsed a complex mud of intimacies normally invisible to the world--the shared sleep, scents, sounds, the habits endearing and frustrating, the pleasures and sadnesses, small and large--the plain mortar that finally renders two as one. Her hair was pulled back
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Richard Flanagan |
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5428260
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It is not that you know nothing about war, young man, Dorrigo Evans had said. It is that you have learnt one thing. And war is many things.
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Richard Flanagan |
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30c8b96
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His fame seemed to him a failure of perception on the part of others.
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Richard Flanagan |
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8548cb5
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As they made their way to the coast, he bemoaned the hotel trade in the manner, Dorrigo felt, that those who love what they do bemoan their passion the most.
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Richard Flanagan |
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1b541b9
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And in all his life around him, Darky Gardiner for the first time sensed his own death. He understood that all this would go on, and of him nothing would remain, that even his memory, though held by a few family and friends for a few years, perhaps decades, would ultimately be forgotten and mean no more than a fallen bamboo, than the inescapable mud. As Darky Gardiner looked up and down the track, as he thought of the naked slaves only a mi..
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Richard Flanagan |
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3a2dd34
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and she would know that love is not goodness, and nor is it happiness.... For Amy, love was the universe touching, exploding within one human being, and that person exploding into the universe. It was annihilation, the destroyer of worlds. And as she lay in bed feeling Keith silently sobbing behind her back, she understood that love does not end until all its power is exorcised in misery and cruelty and obliteration as much as in goodness a..
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Richard Flanagan |
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4e64d14
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Vassals of an outdated ideology unrelated to the real world, they can, when questioned on this issue, only mumble neoliberal mantras that have delivered the world economic stagnation, rising inequality and global environmental crisis
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australian-government
copyright
neoliberalism
theft
plagiarism
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Richard Flanagan |
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8f995f4
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Virtue is virtue, and, like suffering, it is inexplicable, irreducible, unintelligible.
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Richard Flanagan |
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750f1df
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Adversity brings out the best in us ... It's everyday living that does us in.
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Richard Flanagan |
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b363f74
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Why do you love words so? he heard Amy ask. ... They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said.
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Richard Flanagan |
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8cfd4ef
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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 with one soul, he read, and turned the page. But there was nothing - the final page had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding. There was n..
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love
page
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Richard Flanagan |
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9c215ad
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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. He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly evaluated and, as much as possible, eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food prepar..
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Richard Flanagan |
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00e2552
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For Amy, love was the universe touching, exploding within one human being, and that person exploding into the universe. It was annihilation, the destroyer of worlds.
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Richard Flanagan |
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4172d00
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Maybe a lot of people never know love. The idea had never occurred to Dorrigo Evans. Maybe not. 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..
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Richard Flanagan |
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accc252
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I had begun with the comforting conclusion that books are the tongue of divine wisdom, and had ended only with the thin hunch that all books are grand follies, destined forever to be misunderstood.
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Richard Flanagan |
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e9a61c0
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The sum of such chaos was that I seemed to be reading a book that never really started and never quite finished.
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Richard Flanagan |
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ba2e0e0
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He did not believe he was unique or that he had some sort of destiny. In his own heart he felt all such ideas were a complete nonsense, and that death could find him at any moment, as it was now finding so many others. Life wasn't about ideas. Life was a bit about luck. Mostly though, it was a stacked deck. Life was only about getting the next footstep right.
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Richard Flanagan |
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80748a1
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He was not a good surgeon, he was not a good doctor; he was not, he believed in his heart, a good man. But he refused to stop trying.
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Richard Flanagan |
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3a8f535
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As the cards fluttered to earth, as everyone's hand was revealed as worthless, as every point won was shown to be a pointless charade, she would tell them how wonderful this other man was, 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. But instead she watched as Harry Robertson played the right bower, and he and Keith, who always played as ..
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Richard Flanagan |
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1e0d5b4
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He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf.
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Richard Flanagan |
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91a2a70
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Suffering is not virtue, nor does it make virtue, nor does of it virtue necessarily flow.
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Richard Flanagan |
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3cda3c4
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After all, it wasn't food; it was survival.
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Richard Flanagan |
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3e378e4
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And all the time he knew it was his hunger eating him.
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Richard Flanagan |
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cfe2016
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Lest we forget, we say, Bonox Baker said. Isn't that what we say, sir? We do, Bonox. Or incant. Perhaps it's not quite the same thing. So that's why it should be saved. So it's not forgotten. Do you know the poem, Bonox? It's by Kipling. It's not about remembering. It's about forgetting--how everything gets forgotten. Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and..
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Richard Flanagan |
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3480455
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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.
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Richard Flanagan |
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2f09638
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good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.
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Richard Flanagan |
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ce323e1
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He waited for death as a traveller for a bus.
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Richard Flanagan |