I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on. – Richard Flanagan
What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity – Britishness. – Richard Flanagan
Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age – perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent – who painted them, what they mean. – Richard Flanagan
The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in order to halt its spread before it turns the soul of a society septic. – Richard Flanagan
There is a crisis that is not political – an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness – and we’re completely unequal to dealing with it. – Richard Flanagan
John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as ‘a black armband version’ of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism. – Richard Flanagan
If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It’s almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other. – Richard Flanagan
We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things. – Richard Flanagan
For much of the latter part of the 20th century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land of the ‘fair go.’ – Richard Flanagan
Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. – Richard Flanagan
Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage. – Richard Flanagan
In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact. – Richard Flanagan
I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it. – Richard Flanagan
Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost. – Richard Flanagan
Since woodchipping began 32 years ago, Tasmanians have watched as one extraordinary place after another has been sacrificed. Beautiful places, holy places, lost not only to them, but forever. – Richard Flanagan
The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan – Kevin07 – exceeded in its banality only by its success. – Richard Flanagan
I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long – wisely, I felt – shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write. – Richard Flanagan
There’s always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government’s attitude to women. – Richard Flanagan
Writing 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
My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing he ever knew. – Richard Flanagan
Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines. – Richard Flanagan
Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other. – Richard Flanagan
We like love – we love love – but perhaps its only meaning lies in its ubiquitous meaninglessness. We apprehend it, we feel it, and we think we know it, yet we cannot say what we mean by it. – Richard Flanagan
The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles. – Richard Flanagan
I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes. – Richard Flanagan
