Top 100 Richard Flanagan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.”

— Richard Flanagan

2. “Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist.”

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

4. “Adversity brings out the best in us... It’s everyday living that does us in.”

— Richard Flanagan

5. “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.”

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

7. “The most important thing is our dignity. If we have that we can survive on bread and water.”

— Richard Flanagan

8. “We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn’t necessarily bring moral virtue.”

— Richard Flanagan

9. “The journey is long, the road is dark and frightening, but together we can reach our destination: the Tasmania of which we all dream, where all are welcome and all prosper, made no longer of lies but truth, built not of rich men’s hate but our love for our island and for each other.”

— Richard Flanagan

10. “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.”

— Richard Flanagan

11. “Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.”

— Richard Flanagan

12. “The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.”

— Richard Flanagan

13. “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.”

— Richard Flanagan

14. “I’m afraid a lot of people have lost a lot of money over the years betting on me.”

— Richard Flanagan

15. “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.”

— Richard Flanagan

16. “One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.”

— Richard Flanagan

17. “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.”

— Richard Flanagan

18. “The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or wonder or sorrow than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now.”

— Richard Flanagan

19. “We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.”

— Richard Flanagan

20. “Once upon a time... long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us.”

— Richard Flanagan

21. “Film is the art of turning money into light, and light into money. But it begins with money.”

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

23. “To die of old age... is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death. It is the last and extremist kind of dying. It encourages people to lead a life devoted to not dying, which is really another way of not living.”

— Richard Flanagan

24. “Writing reminds you that you’re never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.”

— Richard Flanagan

25. “One man’s feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it’s not equal to anything much at all.”

— Richard Flanagan

26. “Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than what we have been told. Maybe evolution has been going on in reverse longer than I suspect, and we are already sad, dumb fish.”

— Richard Flanagan

27. “Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations – that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls.”

— Richard Flanagan

28. “Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.”

— Richard Flanagan

29. “I think empathy’s a terrible danger for a writer.”

— Richard Flanagan

30. “For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence.”

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

32. “He loved his family. But he was not proud of them. Their principal achievement was survival. It would take him a lifetime to appreciate what an achievement that was.”

— Richard Flanagan

33. “Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath.”

— Richard Flanagan

34. “They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.”

— Richard Flanagan

35. “Duty to his wife. Duty to his children. Duty to work, to committees, to charities. Duty to Lynette. Duty to the other women. It was exhausting. It demanded stamina. At times he amazed even himself.”

— Richard Flanagan

36. “It’s only our faith in illusions that makes life possible. It’s believing in reality that does us in every time.”

— Richard Flanagan

37. “My disgraceful, wicked heart, thought Amy, is braver than the world. For a moment it seemed to Amy that there was nothing in the world she could not meet and vanquish. And though she knew this to be the most foolish idea, it excited and emboldened her further.”

— Richard Flanagan

38. “Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage.”

— Richard Flanagan

39. “Murder and hate are as deeply buried in the human heart as love, perhaps more so, and in truth they’re rather entwined, and if you tried to separate them, you’d be missing something important and human.”

— Richard Flanagan

40. “He could never admit to himself that it was death that had given his life meaning.”

— Richard Flanagan

41. “We live in a material world, not a dramatic one.”

— Richard Flanagan

42. “Memory’s only like justice, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right.”

— Richard Flanagan

43. “It’s a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.”

— Richard Flanagan

44. “But sometimes things are said and they’re not just words. They are everything that one person thinks of another in a sentence. Just one sentence.”

— Richard Flanagan

45. “Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books.”

— Richard Flanagan

46. “No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pretending otherwise is the road to hell.”

— Richard Flanagan

47. “It is not that you know nothing about war, young man, Dorrigo Evans had said. It is that you have learnt one thing. And war is many things.”

— Richard Flanagan

48. “Maybe we just get given our faces, our lives, our fates, our happiness and unhappiness. Some get a lot, some bugger all. And love the same. Like different glass sizes for beer. You get a lot, you get bugger all, you drink it and it’s gone. You know it and then you don’t know it. Maybe we don’t control any of it. No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pretending otherwise is the road to hell.”

— Richard Flanagan

49. “How empty is the world when you lose the one you love.”

— Richard Flanagan

50. “Darky Gardiner loathed Tiny, thought him a fool and would do anything to keep him alive. Because courage, survival, love – all these things didn’t live in one man. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.”

— Richard Flanagan