My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to… — 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
It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia. — 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
“To die of old age...is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death. It is the last and extremist kind of dying. It encourages… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience… — 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 Image
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 Image
In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
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 Image
In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
I grew up in a world that was clannish - old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
