Richard Flanagan

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

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

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

He believed books had an aura that protected him, that without one beside him he would die. He happily slept without women. He never slept without a book.

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

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.

Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

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. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not.

So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them?