269 Quotes by Richard Flanagan

The imprisoning scent of jasmine that always awakened in him a desire to flee.

He continued to believe that, like everything else in his life, it would be righted by the sheer force of his will.

He was not a good surgeon, he was not a good doctor; he was not, he believed in his heart, a good man. But he refused to stop trying.

Rock to gravel to dust to mud to rock and so the world goes, as his mother used to say when he demanded reasons or explanation as to how the world got to be this way or that. The world is, she would say. It just is, boy.

He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

He was looking past Amy’s naked body, over the crescent line between her chest and hip, haloed with tiny hairs, to where, beyond the weathered French doors with their flaking white paint, the moonlight formed a narrow road on the sea that ran away from his gaze into spreadeagled clouds. It was as if it were waiting for him.

Dorrigo glimpsed a complex mud of intimacies normally invisible to the world – the shared sleep, scents, sounds, the habits endearing and frustrating, the pleasures and sadnesses, small and large – the plain mortar that finally renders two as one. Her hair was pulled back.

Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage.

No, Colonel Kota replied, stepping backwards and flipping open his Kuomintang cigarette case to proffer another cigarette.