If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday - you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It's always small, but it's real. -Richard Flanagan Hope
Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943. -Richard Flanagan Death
I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points. -Richard Flanagan Death
In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked. -Richard Flanagan Courage
There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women. -Richard Flanagan Attitude
