Richard Flanagan Quotes

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.

— Richard Flanagan

“A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.”

— Richard Flanagan

And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space - was treated with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter - pleasure, joy, friendship, loved - was deemed somehow peripheral.

— Richard Flanagan

“She was full of yearning. To leave, to be someone else, somewhere else, to start moving and never stop. And yet the more the innermost part of her screamed to move, the more she recognised that she was frozen to one place, one life.”

— Richard Flanagan

“Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”

— Richard Flanagan

“I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.”

— Richard Flanagan

“I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.”

— Richard Flanagan

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.

— Richard Flanagan

“I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.”

— Richard Flanagan

“If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday - you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It's always small, but it's real.”

— Richard Flanagan

“In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.”

— Richard Flanagan

“As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty.”

— Richard Flanagan

“Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.”

— Richard Flanagan

History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.

— Richard Flanagan

“I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.”

— Richard Flanagan

I am the happiest writing and being with the people I love.

— Richard Flanagan

“I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself.”

— Richard Flanagan

“I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.”

— Richard Flanagan

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.

— Richard Flanagan

“In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.”

— Richard Flanagan

I hate the way my life has been inexplicably overwhelmed by questionnaires. Life is so much stranger and so much more beautiful than the lists that reduce it to an anorexic assembly of tics and obsessions.

— Richard Flanagan

“Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.”

— Richard Flanagan

“Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.”

— Richard Flanagan

“They talked about fishing, food, winds and stonework; about growing tomatoes, keeping poultry and roasting lamb, catching crayfish and scallops; telling tales, jokes; the meaning of their stories nothing, the drift of them everything; the brittle and beautiful dream itself.”

— Richard Flanagan

Evans understood that if Nakamura chose, it would be indiscriminately and their number would include the sickest-and perhaps most likely the sickest, because they were of least use to Nakamura-and that all of them would die. If, on the other hand, he, Dorrigo, chose, he could pick the fittest, the ones he thought had the best chance of living. And most would die anyway. That was his choice: to refuse to help the agent of death, or to be his servant.

— Richard Flanagan

He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food preparation would be felt to be more than the reading of poetry; where excitement would come from paying for a soup made out of foraged grass. He had eaten soup made out of foraged grass in the camps; he preferred food.

— Richard Flanagan

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

— Richard Flanagan

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.

— Richard Flanagan

“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.”

— Richard Flanagan

“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.”

— Richard Flanagan

“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

“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.”

— Richard Flanagan

“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

“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.”

— Richard Flanagan

“Death poem of Hyakka,”

— Richard Flanagan

“Pushing away, pushing in: the pattern of so much that was to follow.”

— Richard Flanagan

All life is only allegory and the real story is not here ...

— Richard Flanagan

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. He very softly kissed her lobe.

— Richard Flanagan

“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

“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 wouldn't believe it, Mr. Evans. These two completely different things, a note and a room, finding each other. It sounded ... right. Am I being ridiculous? Do you think that's what we mean by love, Mr. Evans? The note that comes back to you? That finds you even when you don't want to be found? That one day you find someone, and everything they are comes back to you in a strange way that hums? That fits. That's beautiful.”

— Richard Flanagan

I am part of all that I have met.

— Richard Flanagan

“Being prisoner great shame. Great! Redeem honour building railway for Emperor. Great honour. Great!”

— Richard Flanagan

“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.”

— Richard Flanagan

“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

“His fame seemed to him a failure of perception on the part of others.”

— Richard Flanagan

“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

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.

— Richard Flanagan

“The journey is long, the road is dark and frightening, but together we can reach our destination: the Tasmania of which we all dream, where all are welcome and all prosper, made no longer of lies but truth, built not of rich men's hate but our love for our island and for each other.”

— Richard Flanagan

“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.”

— Richard Flanagan

Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath.

— Richard Flanagan