269 Quotes by Richard Flanagan

for a moment he wondered:what if this had all been a mask for the most terrible evil? The idea was too horrific to hold on to.

Refugees are not like you and me. They are you and me. That terrible river of the wretched and damned flowing through Europe is my family. And there is no time in the future in which they might be helped. The only time we have is now.

One small boy jumps over a table, pulls his jumper and shirt up, and turns his back to us to show where shrapnel wounded him when he was three. His classmates shriek with laughter.

The God way. Talking about God this and God that. Fuck God, he had actually wanted to say. Fuck God for having made this world, fucked be his name, now and for fucking ever, fuck God for our lives, fuck God for not saving us, fuck God for not being here and for not saving the men burning on the fucking bamboo.

Like all immigrants, he seemed to have an unerring instinct for the oldest, truest words in his new language. The way he said the word, it felt free of the treacherous weight of mate

What was a prisoner of war anyway? Less than a man, just material to be used to make the railway, like the teak sleepers and steel rails and dog spikes.

So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them?

It was a fabled railway that was the issue of desperation and fanaticism, made as much of myth and unreality as it was to be of wood and iron and the thousands upon thousands of lives that were to be laid down over the next year to build it. But what reality was ever made by realists?

Words are mostly used to keep us asleep, not to wake us.