The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

Like the greatest crimes, it will be as if it never happened.

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.

good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

a grain of rice was so much bigger now than a continent,

In this way, thought Nakamura, the Japanese spirit is now itself the railway, and the railway the Japanese spirit, our narrow road to the deep north, helping to take the beauty and wisdom of Basho to the larger world.

For Amy, love was the universe touching, exploding within one human being, and that person exploding into the universe. It was annihilation, the destroyer of worlds.

He hopes Christ is right. But he does not agree. He does not. He is a doctor. Suffering is suffering. Suffering is not virtue, nor does it make virtue, nor does of it virtue necessarily flow.

For if the living let go of the dead, their own life ceases to matter. The fact of their own survival somehow demands that they are one, now and forever.

Music asked questions of questions, and of these questions there was no end,

It was all ridiculous, and yet to live, he told himself, demanded above all else a ridiculous belief that you could live.

He could never admit to himself that it was death that had given his life meaning.

He had thought her dead. But now he finally understood: it was she who had lived and he who had died.