“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
“Refugees are not like you and me. They are you and me. That terrible river of the wretched and damned flowing through… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything.… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“Her eyes burnt like the blue in a gas flame. They were ferocious things. For some moments her eyes were all he… — 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
I do feel like a fraud a lot of the time because I've never been interested in people who say 'I'm a… — 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
The past is there, but life is circular. I have a strong sense of the circularity of time. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“for a moment he wondered:what if this had all been a mask for the most terrible evil? The idea was too horrific… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“He just stared into the flames. 2 A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else. In his… — 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
