Richard Flanagan

Pain's like water. It finds a way to push through any seal. There's no way to stop it. Sometimes you have to let yourself sink inside of it before you can learn how to swim to the surface.

Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.

To feel love, to be spoken to with kindness, to be reminded of one's abilities and virtues, to be made to laugh when one is downcast, to be intimately touched after a long neglect is astonishingly moving. It is an initiation into life, into the sunshine and the beautiful world.

A life spent thinking you're terrible, not measuring up, feeling at fault at all times is a miserable one.

One more breath of this salty world would kill me.

Some experiences are not meaningful unless you experience them utterly alone.

It seemed that there was nothing any of them could do but stumble blindly back to their lives. And yet they would do everything.

Among the men who fought on the other side, he explained, there were no evil men. They had convinced themselves that they were doing the right thing, and I was no different with my own beliefs. It's just that once the war was over we were too ashamed to admit that we'd believed in something that was wrong.

The more you know, the more you realize how little you actually know.

He knew the war was for the sake of human beings, but he found it hard to believe that dying for someone's sake could be right.

If gravity could only be suspended - even for a brief moment - then he could glide with wings outstretched and everything would be possible.

Without women, men were like children; helpless. Or perhaps it was truer to say it was a woman's intense involvement in the major questions of pain and death that gave men a certain freedom in their relatonships with them.