269 Quotes by 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 so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.

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

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.

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

I wrote. Something. Yes.And you were truthful.No.You weren't truthful?I was accurate.

Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation & reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults & is easily ivied over with paid praises

He had come from the humblest of backgrounds, born in a cottage he had built with his own hands

He was… a lost apostrophe in search of a word to which he might belong

His mode of speaking was largely incomprehensible, his tone was portentous, which is perhaps why he inevitably spoke in capital letters. Words existed in his speech as currants in a badly made bread-and-butter pudding - clusters of stodgy darkness