A fictionalized memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.

— Richard Flanagan

After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding. Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page. But there was nothing - the final page had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding. There was no last page. The book of his life just broke off. There was only the mud below him and the filthy sky above. There was to be no peace and no hope. And Rodrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end.

— Richard Flanagan

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.

— Richard Flanagan

A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

— Richard Flanagan

A good book...leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

— Richard Flanagan

All life is only allegory and the real story is not here...

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

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

... being true to the multitudes within himself that are one and many.

— Richard Flanagan

But what reality was ever made by realists?

— Richard Flanagan