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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| c52f925 | Always remember, what would appear to be a coincidence in a novel was contrived by an author, and a coincidence in life is nothing more but the collision of someone's life story with unstoppable natural forces following their logical paths. | Jack 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 | ||
| c7977e4 | panegyrics of a man they had never understood, | Richard Flanagan | ||
| a2abfcb | The most important thing is our dignity. If we have that we can survive on bread and water. | refugee syrian-refugee-quotes syrian-war | Richard Flanagan | |
| 7ada06f | Dorrigo, the children, her friends, and her wider family - they all existed for her as a way of divining the world. It was a far larger and more wondrous place with them than it was without them. If she hoped for the same love from Dorrigo, and if she was disappointed in her hope, she did not feel its absence as a reason not to love him. The problem was that she did. Her love was without reason and would never yield to reason. Though it lon.. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| a9bf878 | threatening apes. What was this room? How could he get out? The green blindfold was now wrapping around his throat, choking him. His heart was pounding. He | Richard Flanagan | ||
| b473059 | Love is public,... or it's not love. Love is shared with others or it dies. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 995452b | and every word sounded both a defence against what he truly felt and a betrayal of all that he was. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 9e2b9d9 | Dorrigo felt a warm | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 2883136 | In the end all that was left was the heat and the clouds of rain, and insects and birds and animals and vegetation that neither knew nor cared. 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. Decades | Richard Flanagan | ||
| c2e8a90 | behind which the panting dog drooped like a dropped chamois. It was too hot to smoke, but he smoked his pipe anyway. The smoke wreathed a strange smile that Dorrigo later came to realise was fixed; determined to find the world cheery in spite of all the evidence life produced to the contrary. | optimism realisation resignation | Richard Flanagan | |
| d1c4f76 | One man's feeling is not always equal to all that life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all. | Richard Flanagan | ||
| 9659091 | 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 fucking being here and for not fucking saving the men burning on the fucking bamboo. | Richard Flanagan |