{"author":"Richard Flanagan","author_id":"Richard+Flanagan","total_quotes":42,"quotes":[{"text":"A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.","author":"Richard Flanagan","tags":["books","literature","reading","words"],"id":3784,"author_id":"Richard+Flanagan"},{"text":"Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated \u0026 in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate \u0026 shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete \u0026 horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage \u0026 him in his youth.","author":"Richard Flanagan","tags":["ageing","change","growth","life"],"id":14548,"author_id":"Richard+Flanagan"},{"text":"I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.","author":"Richard Flanagan","tags":["father","experience","culture "],"id":18853,"author_id":"Richard+Flanagan"},{"text":"Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites.For the line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only. And of that colossal ruin, boundless and buried, the lone and level jungle stretched far away. Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass.","author":"Richard Flanagan","tags":["loss","past","war"],"id":26659,"author_id":"Richard+Flanagan"},{"text":"Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans' earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blinding light and him toddling back and forth, in and out of its transcendent welcome, into the arms of women. Women who loved him. Like entering the sea and returning to the beach. Over and over.","author":"Richard Flanagan","tags":["childhood","church","light","welcome"],"id":31099,"author_id":"Richard+Flanagan"},{"text":"The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.","author":"Richard Flanagan","tags":["irony"],"id":32997,"author_id":"Richard+Flanagan"},{"text":"The most important thing is our dignity. If we have that we can survive on bread and water.","author":"Richard Flanagan","tags":["dignity","refugee","syrian-refugee","syrian-war"],"id":37329,"author_id":"Richard+Flanagan"},{"text":"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.","author":"Richard Flanagan","tags":["death-of-the-novel","technology","writers"],"id":51922,"author_id":"Richard+Flanagan"},{"text":"The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs.","author":"Richard Flanagan","tags":["death","dying","life","war"],"id":72855,"author_id":"Richard+Flanagan"},{"text":"-to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history \u0026 the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!","author":"Richard Flanagan","tags":["history"],"id":74422,"author_id":"Richard+Flanagan"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":42,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}