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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d4bf58e | Szczesliwy czlowiek nie ma przeszlosci, a nieszczesliwy nie ma nic poza nia | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 772fa39 | She always preferred strong lies to weak truths | marriage truth women | Richard Flanagan | |
| bd76e88 | 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. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| d3b3f8d | Being prisoner great shame. Great! Redeem honour building railway for Emperor. Great honour. Great! | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 8936694 | Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation & reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults & is easily ivied over with paid praises | commercialization creativity inspirational | Richard Flanagan | |
| 18b6fba | To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping. | stories the-novel transcendence | Richard Flanagan | |
| 1693ec5 | Thinking: The world is. It just is. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 4c28ee2 | Speedo, when they worked us seventy days and | Richard Flanagan | ||
| e29c8af | Io non ci credo, disse la donna. No, non ci credo. e una parola troppo piccola, non le pare signor Evans?Ho un'amica, a Fern Tree, che insegna pianoforte. e una donna molto musicale. Io non ho orecchio. Ma un giorno la mia amica mi dice che ogni stanza ha una nota. Devi solo scoprirla. Si mette a gorgheggiare in giro, in alto e in basso. E di colpo una nota ritorna indietro, rimbalza sulle pareti, si leva dal pavimento e riempie la stanza c.. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| dbf30ca | He understood that he shared certain features, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him. He'd just had more success at living than at dying, | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 561fa40 | The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs. | dying life war | Richard Flanagan | |
| acf0ca9 | He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf. But | Richard Flanagan | ||
| fbb04c9 | Though every dead man is a reduction of their number, the thousand POWs who first left Changi as Evans' J Force--an assortment of Tasmanians and West Australians surrendered in Java, South Australians surrendered at Singapore, survivors of the sinking of the destroyer, HMAS Newcastle, a few Vics and New South Welshmen from other military misadventures, and some RAAF airmen--remain Evans' J Force. That's what they were when they arrived and .. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 3d7dd26 | 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 labour; a marriage--the strange, terrible neverendingness of human beings. A family. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| bc02838 | The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or sorrow or wonder than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now. | now past present time | Richard Flanagan | |
| afd931e | death poem of Hyakka, | Richard Flanagan | ||
| a1f5bbd | lHrb ky'nt bshry@. lHrb hy m nmthlh nHn. lHrb hy m nf`lh | Richard Flanagan | ||
| c1e0ef3 | Days and months are travellers of eternity. So too the years that pass by | Richard Flanagan | ||
| e76558a | I have a friend in Fern Tree who teaches piano. Very musical, she is. I'm tone-deaf myself. But one day she was telling me how every room has a note. You just have to find it. She started warbling away, up and down. And suddenly one note came back to us, just bounced back off the walls and rose from the floor and filled the place with this perfect hum. This beautiful sound. Like you've thrown a plum and an orchard comes back at you. You wou.. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| cd0624d | ymkn Htw lr`b dkhl ktb ymnHh shklan wm`n~. 'm fy lHy@ flm y`d llr`b shkl 'kthr mm ywjd llm`n~. lr`b hw lr`b. w`ndm ydhm ySbH km lw 'nh l ywjd shy fy lkwn Gyrh | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 5b0c9f5 | 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. When they feared the weakness it bespoke. The trouble to which it led. He would live to see p.. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| d0472a5 | n ldhkr@ tshbh l`dl@ fqT, l'nh fkr@ khTy'@ 'khr~ tj`l lns ysh`rwn b'nhm `l~ m yrm | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 094fa04 | ymknk 'n tdkhl fy Hrb m` l`lm, lkn l`lm syrbH dy'man | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 44b1ecd | they together staggered through those days that built like a scream that never ended, a wet, green shriek Dorrigo Evans found perversely amplified by the quinine deafness, the malarial haze that meant a minute took a lifetime to pass and that sometimes it was not possible to recall a week of misery and horror. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 39a3f1a | The only people who believe in straight roads are generals & mail coach drivers. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 9f9cb35 | They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet. Beneath | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 3fc69d0 | My only idea ever, Dorrigo had confessed, is to advance forward and charge the windmill. Taylor had laughed, but Dorrigo had meant it. It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible, Squizzy, he had explained, in as close to an explanation of himself as he ever offered. It's believing in reality that does us in every time. He | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 41d7a0a | A murderer's light spilled out from the sunset. It flooded William Street with its ruddy glow and ran beneath the blue-black hail clouds and up the boulevard like hot blood. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 9f9076c | 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. | war | Richard Flanagan | |
| 348ac3a | And you were truthful. No. You weren't truthful? I was accurate. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| b04e88d | name is Markos, he said. But call me Marco. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 92431b7 | Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites. | past war | Richard Flanagan | |
| 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 |