Top 100 Richard Flanagan Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Virtue is virtue, and, like suffering, it is inexplicable, irreducible, unintelligible.”

— Richard Flanagan

52. “And so he poured himself with renewed determination into her arms, into her conversations, into her fears and jokes and stories, hoping that this intimacy would finally smother all memory of Amy Mulvaney.”

— Richard Flanagan

53. “In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as one fixed thing, a plaster death mask, which as soon as it was touched crumbled in his figures back into dust.”

— Richard Flanagan

54. “What you’re constantly seeking isn’t a style, but a transparency between your soul and the words. And your soul is ever in flux, so therefore you have to constantly find new forms of words that might be able to register these changes in the soul.”

— Richard Flanagan

55. “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.”

— Richard Flanagan

56. “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.”

— Richard Flanagan

57. “What reality was ever made by realists?”

— Richard Flanagan

58. “His fame seemed to him a failure of perception on the part of others.”

— Richard Flanagan

59. “I had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you’re fortunate enough to reach my age, to still be writing, you have to be grateful, and I am. I’ve been lucky. For many years, all I’ve done is writing, and it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

— Richard Flanagan

60. “They felt their own judgements absolute and the judgements of others idiocy or wickedness deserving the worst punishment. It was as if everyone had to believe their own story – any story, really – because if they stopped believing there would only be reality left to deal with. No one doubted, or was unsure; every individual was infallible because it was their truth, and so there could be no truth and the world was wrong.”

— Richard Flanagan

61. “In the end all that was left was the heat and the clouds of rain, and insects and birds and animals and vegetation that neither knew nor cared. Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo. Decades.”

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

63. “In the end you’re not made or broken by prizes. Your relationship is with your readers, not a prize, and you just have to keep on honoring that.”

— Richard Flanagan

64. “Because in the end history – like the Berlin Wall – shapes people, had shaped her, but would not in the end determine her, because in the end it cannot account for the great irrational – the great human – forces: the destructive power of evil, the redeeming power of love.”

— Richard Flanagan

65. “Vassals of an outdated ideology unrelated to the real world, they can, when questioned on this issue, only mumble neoliberal mantras that have delivered the world economic stagnation, rising inequality and global environmental crisis.”

— Richard Flanagan

66. “He did not believe he was unique or that he had some sort of destiny. In his own heart he felt all such ideas were a complete nonsense, and that death could find him at any moment, as it was now finding so many others. Life wasn’t about ideas. Life was a bit about luck. Mostly though, it was a stacked deck. Life was only about getting the next footstep right.”

— Richard Flanagan

67. “I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they’re the ones to whom it falls.”

— Richard Flanagan

68. “Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won’t forgive you one false note about love, about which they too are expert.”

— Richard Flanagan

69. “Dorrigo Evans hated virtue, hated virtue being admired, hated people who pretended he had virtue or pretended to virtue themselves. And the more he was accused of virtue as he grew older, the more he hated it. He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.”

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

71. “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.”

— Richard Flanagan

72. “I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.”

— Richard Flanagan

73. “When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.”

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

75. “Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo.”

— Richard Flanagan

76. “As they made their way to the coast, he bemoaned the hotel trade in the manner, Dorrigo felt, that those who love what they do bemoan their passion the most.”

— Richard Flanagan

77. “A writer has to stand outside the page. It’s not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It’s not for him to suffer or to laugh or to experience ecstasy or agony in the manner of the characters on the pages.”

— Richard Flanagan

78. “He had the sense that the gods was just another name for time, but he felt that it would be as stupid to say such a thing as it would be to suggest that against the gods we can never prevail.”

— Richard Flanagan

79. “The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it – I think the opposite is true.”

— Richard Flanagan

80. “Ulysses’. No one reads him anymore. No one reads anything anymore. They think Browning is a gun.”

— Richard Flanagan

81. “He had the sourdough smell of age. His chest sagged into shrivelled teats; his lovemaking was unreliable, yet she found it strangely wholesome in a way that defied sense.”

— Richard Flanagan

82. “It’s like life, isn’t it? You think you’ll outrun it, that you’re better than it, but it makes a fool of you every time. It runs you into the ground and steams off whistling away, happy as buggery with itself.”

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

86. “He read and reread ‘Ulysses’. He looked back at Amy. They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said.”

— Richard Flanagan

87. “And one thing, as they sometimes do, led not to another, but shattered a world.”

— Richard Flanagan

88. “And in the deepest recesses of his being, Dorrigo Evans understood that all his life had been a journeying to this point when he had for a moment flown into the sun and would now be journeying away from it forever after.”

— Richard Flanagan

89. “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.”

— Richard Flanagan

90. “He had forgotten the sharp taste of stone dust that hung around the broken village houses, the dead skinny donkeys’ smell and the dead wretched goats’ smell, the broken terraces’ smell and smashed olive groves’ smell, the sour stench of high explosive, the heavy odour of spilled olive oil, all melding into a single smell he came to associate with human beings in trouble.”

— Richard Flanagan

91. “He fell asleep and again dreamt of being rowed by two myrtle trees, except this time they rowed through the stars to the moon, and it was quiet, and while everything went on forever the stars were as knowable and as safe and as comforting a world as that of the rainforested rivers.”

— Richard Flanagan

92. “The world is, she would say. It just is, boy.”

— Richard Flanagan

93. “They talked about fishing, food, winds and stonework; about growing tomatoes, keeping poultry and roasting lamb, catching crayfish and scallops; telling tales, jokes; the meaning of their stories nothing, the drift of them everything; the brittle and beautiful dream itself.”

— Richard Flanagan

94. “The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.”

— Richard Flanagan

95. “He reasoned that, as there was nothing he could do about his feelings, he must avoid acting on them.”

— Richard Flanagan

96. “Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it’s seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don’t share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit.”

— Richard Flanagan

97. “I had begun with the comforting conclusion that books are the tongue of divine wisdom, and had ended only with the thin hunch that all books are grand follies, destined forever to be misunderstood.”

— Richard Flanagan

98. “In Australia the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle. I just didn’t expect to end up with the chicken.”

— Richard Flanagan

99. “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.”

— Richard Flanagan

100. “At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work – an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end.”

— Richard Flanagan