Richard Flanagan quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Richard Flanagan on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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.

And one thing, as they sometimes do, led not to another, but shattered a world.

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.

In this world we walk on the roof of hell gazing at flowers.

I grew up in a world that was clannish - old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families.

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.

The number of those identifying as Aborigine in Tasmania rapidly rose in the late 20th century.

My purpose holds, To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars until I die.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

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.

Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist.

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.

Once upon a time...long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us.

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.

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

He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf.

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.

It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia.

From that woman on the beach, dusk pours out across the evening waves. ISSA

smell its acrid horsehair upholstery and stale flour,

I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.

The imprisoning scent of jasmine that always awakened in him a desire to flee.

An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.

I think writing should be about change.

One man's feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all.

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

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.

Without love, what was the world?

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.

Even in Kyoto when I hear the cuckoo I long for Kyoto.

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.

But what reality was ever made by realists? They

When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.

The past is there, but life is circular. I have a strong sense of the circularity of time.

In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.

In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself.

Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.

Railway fettler, and his family lived in a Tasmanian Government Railways

Nineveh, Tyre, a God-forsaken railway in Siam, Dorrigo Evans said, flame

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.

Speedo, when they worked us seventy days and

Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.

Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage.

I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.

I do not come out of a literary tradition.

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.

What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.

My mother hoped I'd be a plumber.

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

Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.

The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.

He ... discovered that people's goodwill was frequently in inverse relationship to their position ...

The only people who believe in straight roads are generals & mail coach drivers.

Darky was always looking for the good thing, no matter how small, and consequently he often found it.

Words are mostly used to keep us asleep, not to wake us.

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.

Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few.

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

Memory's only like justice, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right.

No, Colonel Kota replied, stepping backwards and flipping open his Kuomintang cigarette case to proffer another cigarette

Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts.

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.

He could never admit to himself that it was death that had given his life meaning.

Auger-eyed woman's small stout form, outlining her

Thinking: The world is. It just is.

I am part of all that I have met.

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.

God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted.

You could never know when everything might change - a mood, a decision, a blanket. A life. They

... being true to the multitudes within himself that are one and many.

Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books.