Commissioned Quotes by Richard Flanagan

I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.

— Richard Flanagan

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

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

— Richard Flanagan

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

In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.

— Richard Flanagan

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

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

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

— Richard Flanagan

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

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

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

You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.

— Richard Flanagan