My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died. Richard Flanagan Read Quote
Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after. Richard Flanagan Read Quote
War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art. Richard Flanagan Read Quote
Of all the love stories ever published, I have – realistically – read very few. Richard Flanagan Read Quote
We like love – we love love – but perhaps its only meaning lies in its ubiquitous meaninglessness. We apprehend it, we feel it, and we think we know it, yet we cannot say what we mean by it. Richard Flanagan Read Quote
I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long – wisely, I felt – shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write. Richard Flanagan Read Quote
The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles. Richard Flanagan Read Quote
Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age – perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent – who painted them, what they mean. Richard Flanagan Read Quote
A Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, who does believe in climate change, nevertheless advised her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, to abandon his emissions trading scheme. Richard Flanagan Read Quote
It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia. Richard Flanagan Read Quote
