01c. 1985 AD... being true to the multitudes within himself that are one and many.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
02c. 1985 ADAfter a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding.Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page.But there was nothing - the final page had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding. There was no last page. The book of his life just broke off. There was only the mud below him and the filthy sky above. There was to be no peace and no hope. And Dorrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
03c. 1985 ADFor an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created, greater than any god man worshiped, for it was the only true god. It was as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal. For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
04c. 1985 ADOnce upon a time...long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
05c. 1985 ADThe more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
06c. 1985 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
07c. 1985 ADHe 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 soup made out of foraged grass. He had eaten soup made out of foraged grass in the camps; he preferred food.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
09c. 1985 ADIn Australia the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle. I just didn’t expect to end up with the chicken.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
10c. 1985 ADThe most important thing is our dignity. If we have that we can survive on bread and water.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
11c. 1985 ADThere's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
12c. 1985 ADIf you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday - you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It's always small, but it's real.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
13c. 1985 ADA fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
14c. 1985 AD'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
15c. 1985 ADI think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
16c. 1985 ADWriting my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
17c. 1985 ADIn all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.Richard Flanagan / quote ↗
