Author: Richard Flanagan

Cites

• Fyodor Dostoevsky (1)
  • IN: Wanting (2008) Fiction, Australian
    EPIGRAPH: You see, reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is unquestionable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man's reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life.
    FROM: Notes from Underground, (1864), Novel, Russia
• Bible (1)
  • IN: Wanting (2008) Fiction, Australian
    EPIGRAPH: That which is wanting cannot be numbered.
    FROM: Ecclesiastes, (-165), Bible, NULL
• Paul Celan (1)
  • IN: The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) Fiction, Australian
    EPIGRAPH: Mother, they write poems.
    FROM: Wolf's-Bean, (1997), NULL, Romania/Germany
• Bashō (1)
  • IN: The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) Fiction, Australian
    EPIGRAPH: A bee staggers out of the peony.
    FROM: NULL, (None), NULL, Japan
• Select Committee on Transportation of Convicts (1)
  • IN: First Person (2017) Fiction, Australian
    EPIGRAPH: Question -- Are there many booksellers' shops? James Mudie, Esq. -- I should think there are about half-a-dozen in Sydney. Question -- What kind of books do you see sold in those shops; is the class of books different from what you see sold in booksellers' shops in London? James Mudie, Esq. -- Inferior certainly; there are many novels, for instance. I have attended what they call book sales myself, and I have always found that books really valueable have sold for much less than they could have cost in England, and I remember on one occasion there was a regular noise in the room when the Newgate Calendar was put up, and every person said, 'Ah, I shall have that!' I forget what it brought, but it brought something enormous... Then they are fond of the history of highwaymen or anything of that kind.
    FROM: British Parliamentary Papers, Minutes of Evidence, (1837), NULL, UK
• William Blake (1)
  • IN: Death of a River Guide (1994) Fiction, Australian
    EPIGRAPH: Who Present, Past & Future sees Whose ears have heard, The Holy Word, That walk'd among the ancient trees.
    FROM: Introduction to Songs of Experience, (1794), Poem, UK
• Rainer Maria Rilke (1)
  • IN: Death of a River Guide (1994) Fiction, Australian
    EPIGRAPH: That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called 'visions', the whole so-called 'spirit-world', death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out by life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.
    FROM: Letter to Franz Kappus, (1904), Letter, Czech Republic
• William Faulkner (1)
  • IN: Gould's Book of Fish (2001) Fiction, Australian
    EPIGRAPH: My mother is a fish.
    FROM: As I Lay Dying, (1930), Novel, US

Cited by

• Rabih Alameddine (1)
  • IN: An Unnecessary Woman (2013) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliation - that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls. And more, moreover. Or perhaps not.
    FROM: Gould's Book of Fish, (2001), Novel, Australian