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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
8857944	He found in the time he was able to spend with Tom--by phone once a month and what became after a time an annual visit to Sydney in midwinter, and then, as his reputation grew and he travelled to Sydney more frequently--that special closeness that siblings sometimes have. It was an ease of company that allows for most things to be unsaid, for awkwardness and error to be entirely unimportant, and for that strange sense of a mysterious shared..			Richard Flanagan
6efc6c6	Pushing away, pushing in: the pattern of so much that was to follow.			Richard Flanagan
3ce7ce0	He found in the time he was able to spend with Tom--by phone once a month and what became after a time an annual visit to Sydney in midwinter, and then, as his reputation grew and he travelled to Sydney more frequently--that special closeness that siblings sometimes have. It was an ease of company that allows for most things to be unsaid, for awkwardness and error to be entirely unimportant, and for that strange sense of a mysterious shared..			Richard Flanagan
bfc1d72	To control the deaths of others - when, where, the craft of ensuring it was a cleanly sliced ending - that was possible. And in some strange way, such killing felt like controlling whatever remained of his own life.			Richard Flanagan
48f3c63	From that woman on the beach, dusk pours out across the evening waves. ISSA			Richard Flanagan
1f43028	Rock to gravel to dust to mud to rock and so the world goes, as his mother used to say when he demanded reasons or explanation as to how the world got to be this way or that. The world is, she would say. It just is, boy.			Richard Flanagan
3aa24c1	He had the sense that the gods was just another name for time, but he felt that it would be as stupid to say such a thing as it would be to suggest that against the gods we can never prevail.			Richard Flanagan
fac42a1	What sort of soldier are you? she asked. Not much of one. Using his book, he tapped the triangular brown patch with its inset green circle sewn on his tunic shoulder. 2/7th Casualty Clearing Station. I'm a doctor. He			Richard Flanagan
bfe19b5	It had been a day to die, not because it was a special day but because it wasn't, and every day was a day to die now, and the only question that pressed on them, as to who might be next, had been answered.			Richard Flanagan
a817acc	For the rest of his life he would yield to circumstance and expectation, coming to call these strange weights duty.			Richard Flanagan
6bad3a3	A man, good or bad, was magnificent. It was not possible that this thing that was nothing and would never change [death] could mean the end of everything that moved and changed within him - the good, the bad, the magnificent. Yet it did.			Richard Flanagan
bc505e4	He...discovered that people's goodwill was frequently in inverse relationship to their position...			Richard Flanagan
aa910a4	memorial coins.			Richard Flanagan
4f234e8	He read books. He liked none of them. He searched their pages for Amy. She was not there. He went to parties. They bored him. He walked the streets, gazing into strangers' faces. Amy was not there. The world, in all its infinite wonder, bored him. He searched every room of his life for Amy. But Amy was not anywhere to be found.			Richard Flanagan
39ecc51	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.			Richard Flanagan
5b25104	My purpose holds, To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars until I die.			Richard Flanagan
fcbebd7	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.			Richard Flanagan
b463dd9	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.			Richard Flanagan
cf8e943	There was no meaning in it, not then and now now, but you can't write that, can you?			Richard Flanagan
005e0ae	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.			Richard Flanagan
d392a6b	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.			Richard Flanagan
a335bab	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?			Richard Flanagan
6c97917	where is truth to be found			Richard Flanagan
042b2d5	he understood the measure of his life now to be his capacity to believe in something - anything - other than what was happening in front of him. So they saw, but they did not see; so they heard, but they did not hear; and they knew, they knew it all, but still they tried not to know.			Richard Flanagan
9ff9df6	Life was a bit about luck. Mostly though, it was a stacked deck. Life was only about getting the next footstep right.			Richard Flanagan
69ae368	For beneath that delicate black powder something highly unusual was happening: the book's marbled cover was giving off a faint, but increasingly bright purple glow.			Richard Flanagan
2d5285e	But sometimes [love] was just there: ... he was ... shocked to know he had been lucky to live and know it, to love and be loved.			Richard Flanagan
b61f19d	People kept on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only.			Richard Flanagan
4adb2bd	They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet.			Richard Flanagan
5615680	You see, reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is unquestionable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man's reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life. Fyodor Dostoevsky			Richard Flanagan
a63368f	Even in Kyoto when I hear the cuckoo I long for Kyoto.			Richard Flanagan
59825fb	Dorrigo Evans was unable to make head or tail of it. His tastes were in any case already ossifying into the prejudices of those who voyage far into classics in adolescence and rarely journey elsewhere again. He was mostly lost with the contemporary and preferred the literary fashions of half a century before--in his case, the Victorian poets and the writers of antiquity.			Richard Flanagan
c41d4a1	Darky ate slowly, enjoying every morsel, his mouth salivating so wildly that he worried at the loud sloshing sound he made. But it was lost in all the other wet noises of the night.			Richard Flanagan
a42cf7b	and they were deeply moved not so much by the poetry as by their sensitivity to poetry; not so much by the genius of the poem as by their wisdom in understanding the poem; not in knowing the poem but in knowing the poem demonstrated the higher side of themselves and of the Japanese spirit--			Richard Flanagan
f80adca	possibly			Richard Flanagan
86c2db2	And this grey spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.			Richard Flanagan
ea57089	The world is, she would say. It just is, boy.			Richard Flanagan
429aded	DARKY GARDINER OPENED his eyes and blinked. Raindrops fell on his face. He pushed his hands into the mud but they kept sinking. He was swimming in shit. He tried to get back to his feet. It was impossible. He was swimming in ever more shit. He tried to curl up to protect himself. It did no good and he only sank back into the foul hole. If he closed his eyes he was back there being beaten. If he opened his eyes he was drowning in shit, tryin..			Richard Flanagan
81dfbf0	railway fettler, and his family lived in a Tasmanian Government Railways			Richard Flanagan
ca75686	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.			Richard Flanagan
d1dd782	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?			Richard Flanagan
1fe7417	Nineveh, Tyre, a God-forsaken railway in Siam, Dorrigo Evans said, flame			Richard Flanagan
edfde40	vessels with mini-subs and helicopters attached. As well as undertaking the more conventional			Richard Flanagan
5f0ca3b	He just stared into the flames. 2 A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else. In his old age Dorrigo Evans never knew if he had read this or had himself made it up. Made up, mixed up, and broken down. Relentlessly broken down. Rock to gravel to dust to mud to rock and so the world goes, as his mother used to say when he demanded reasons or explanation as to how the world got to be this way or that. The world is, she woul..			Richard Flanagan

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