269 Quotes by Richard Flanagan

The enslavement, humiliation, torture, and ultimate destruction of thousands upon thousands of human beings for a project for which there was ultimately no purpose is a horror that's very hard to imagine, far less understand.

You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.

I think writing should be about change.

I think it's always wrong of writers to make too much of the pains of their labors, because most people have much worse jobs and suffer such indignities and hardships.

She was full of yearning. To leave, to be someone else, somewhere else, to start moving and never stop. And yet the more the innermost part of her screamed to move, the more she recognised that she was frozen to one place, one life.

The sum of such chaos was that I seemed to be reading a book that never really started and never quite finished.

On his death bed, the eighteenth-century haiku poet Shisui had finally responded to requests for a death poem by grabbing his brush, painting his poem, and dying. On the paper Shisui’s shocked followers saw he had painted a circle.

These days he relied on the increasingly fragile assumption that what he said was right, and what was right was what he said.

A world of dew and within every dewdrop a world of struggle. ISSA.