Quotes by Richard Flanagan

About Richard Flanagan:

Richard Miller Flanagan is an Australian novelist from Tasmania. "Considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation", according to The Economist, each of his novels has attracted major praise and received numerous awards and honours. He also has written and directed feature films. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations—that we are more than ourselves; th...

Richard Flanagan

Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some ...

Richard Flanagan

-to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!

Richard Flanagan

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

Richard Flanagan

We've been trained to live a life of moral cowardice while all the time comforting ourselves that we are nature's rebels. But in truth we've never got upset & excited about anything; we're like the sheep we shot the Aborigines to make way for, docile...

Richard Flanagan

And when I had finished painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was ...

Richard Flanagan

There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.

Richard Flanagan

Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age - perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent - who painted them, what they mean.

Richard Flanagan

War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.

Richard Flanagan

'The Bradshaws' is the appropriately inappropriate English title given to an enigma - some hundreds of thousands of mysterious rock art paintings scattered through the wilds of the Kimberley, an area larger than Germany in the remote, scarcely popula...

Richard Flanagan

A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.

Richard Flanagan

Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans' earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blinding light and him toddling back and forth, in and ou...

Richard Flanagan

Because courage, survival, love—all these things didn’t live in one man. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.

Richard Flanagan

The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs.

Richard Flanagan

The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.

Richard Flanagan

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as one fixed thing, a plaster death mask, which as soon...

Richard Flanagan

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.

Richard Flanagan

As they made their way to the coast, he bemoaned the hotel trade in the manner, Dorrigo felt, that those who love what they do bemoan their passion the most.

Richard Flanagan

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

Richard Flanagan

He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food preparation would be felt to be more than the reading of poetry; where excitement would come from paying for a sou...

Richard Flanagan

Author Bio

  • NameRichard Flanagan
  • Descriptionprize winning novelist from Tasmania
  • Born1961
  • CountryAustralia
  • ProfessionWriter; Journalist; Film Director; Novelist
  • AwardsCommonwealth Writers' Prize; Man Booker Prize