Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf. But” — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human?… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
The past is there, but life is circular. I have a strong sense of the circularity of time. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“… behind which the panting dog drooped like a dropped chamois. It was too hot to smoke, but he smoked his pipe… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I hate the way my life has been inexplicably overwhelmed by questionnaires. Life is so much stranger and so much more beautiful… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings,… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“Under the influence of mercury, which he administered to himself daily as a salve for his syphilis, & laudanum, which he drank… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others.… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“And in all his life around him, Darky Gardiner for the first time sensed his own death. He understood that all this… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share
Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share
In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share
Within white Australia, there was a growing movement for what was known as reconciliation - a movement that peaked with millions marching in 2000… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share
In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share
Murder and hate are as deeply buried in the human heart as love, perhaps more so, and in truth they're rather entwined, and if… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share
My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing he ever… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share
I grew up in a world that was clannish - old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share
If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour, it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast,… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share
The enslavement, humiliation, torture, and ultimate destruction of thousands upon thousands of human beings for a project for which there was ultimately no purpose… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share
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 Copy Share
You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share
Family matters, friends matter, love matters. Those you love and who love you matter. That's what writing does - it allows you to say… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share
A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share
