Richard Flanagan Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Richard Flanagan
Richard Flanagan Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Richard Flanagan on Wise Famous Quotes.
They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet.
The survival of extraordinary creatures such as the giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish - the largest in the world - is in doubt because of logging.
A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.
There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it.
He reasoned that, as there was nothing he could do about his feelings, he must avoid acting on them.
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.
I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.
I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.
When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.
He continued to believe that, like everything else in his life, it would be righted by the sheer force of his will
You can spend a day in a library and feel: 'Great, I've done a day's work.' But it's only research, not writing.
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.
It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words - all the words that did not say things directly - were for him the most truthful.
He read and reread 'Ulysses'. He looked back at Amy. They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said.
In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.
My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing he ever knew.
We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.
The new music, the bebop and modern jazz, wasn't music to him. It was choppy noise pretending to make music out of traffic jams.
History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.
And this grey spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
I have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of being taken away.
The sum of such chaos was that I seemed to be reading a book that never really started and never quite finished.
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.
One man's feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all.
For the rest of his life he would yield to circumstance and expectation, coming to call these strange weights duty.
You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.
In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.
Every death of those you love is the death also of so many shared memories and understanding, of a now irretrievable part of your own life.
I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.
A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.
We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion.
These days he relied on the increasingly fragile assumption that what he said was right, and what was right was what he said.
In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself.
It is not that you know nothing about war, young man ... It is that you have learnt one thing. And war is many things.
I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.
Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.
I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.
Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.
In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.
He ... discovered that people's goodwill was frequently in inverse relationship to their position ...
Darky was always looking for the good thing, no matter how small, and consequently he often found it.
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.
All men were liars and he was no doubt no different - only one tongue and more tales than the dog pound.
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.
No, Colonel Kota replied, stepping backwards and flipping open his Kuomintang cigarette case to proffer another cigarette
The only accusation of Gillian Triggs with the ring of truth is that she has lost the confidence of the government - but then, so too has Tony Abbott.
Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.
It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible...It's believing in reality that does us in every time.
I was one of six kids; my grandmother lived with us. We had an aunt who used to have nerves, and all her kids would turn up and live with us.