Gould's Book of Fish Quotes

“So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them?”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others. I had endured too much to be reduced to an idea. Onto that pyre I threw so many, many words - that entire untrue literature of the past which had shackled & subjugated my as surely as the spiked iron collars & leg locks & jagged basils & balls & chains & headshaving - that had so long denied me my free voice & the stories I needed to tell. I no longer wished to read lies as to who & why I was. I knew who I was”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“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 humiliations—that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“And when I had finished painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder & beauty left to go round as each fish was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking & plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming ever more impoverished of love & wonder & beauty in consequence, what, in the end, would be left?”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security—national, individual, spiritual—wasn’t a bad joke being played on them by a bored and capricious destiny. To be told that there was no connection between then and now, that they didn't need to wear a black armband or have a bad conscience about their power and their wealth and everybody else’s lack of it; to feel rotten that no-one could or would explain why the wealth of a few seemed so curiously dependent on the misery of the many. We kindly pretended that it was about buying and selling chairs, about them asking questions about price and heritage, and us replying in like manner.

But it wasn’t about price and heritage, it wasn’t about that at all.

The tourists had insistent, unspoken questions and we just had to answer as best we could, with forged furniture. They were really asking, 'Are we safe?' and we were really replying, 'No, but a barricade of useless goods may help block the view.' And because hubris is not just an ancient Greek word but a human sense so deep-seated we might better regard it as an unerring instinct, they were also wanting to know, 'If it is our fault, then will we suffer?' and we were really replying, 'Yes, and slowly, but a fake chair may make us both feel better about it.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than what we have been told. Maybe evolution has been going on in reverse longer than I suspect, and we are already sad, dumb fish.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish

“...& she, armed with both & abandoning the joys of reason that had meant so much to her as well as me, made a suitably advantageous marriage with an ironmonger with a face like an anvil & a soul like a slag, & so I never saw her freckles fade, her auburn hair dull, never had to watch our love turn to that non-colour, white.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“-to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“Under the influence of mercury, which he administered to himself daily as a salve for his syphilis, & laudanum, which he drank each evening in imprecisely measured amounts to enable him to sleep, because of all things, this brave man feared only his dreams, opiate-enhanced nightmares that gave him no respite & which always ended in flames from which he rose phoenix-like just before dawn each morning, to recommence building what was already ash.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“He was… a lost apostrophe in search of a word to which he might belong”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“The only people who believe in straight roads are generals & mail coach drivers.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“A coat hanger of a body trying to remember the coat that years before had fallen off”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or sorrow or wonder than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“Նույիսկ այս այլանդակ կղզու այլանդակ չափանիշներով Յորգեն Յորգենսենը, որքան էլ որ փքվեր, հավալուսնի խղճուկ մի կղկղանք էր՝ երկար ու սուր անկյուններով, կարճ ասած՝ ոչ թե մարդ, այլ վերնահագուստի կանգուն կախիչ, որը փորձում է հիշել, թե տարիներ առաջ ինչ հագուստ է իր կեռիկից ընկել:”
― Richard Flanagan, Գուլդի ձկնագիրքը

“I had begun with the comforting conclusion that books are the tongue of divine wisdom, and had ended only with the thin hunch that all books are grand follies, destined forever to be misunderstood.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“Once upon a time...long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“The sum of such chaos was that I seemed to be reading a book that never really started and never quite finished.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish

“At that point there could have been nothing more likely to depress me than the dismal prospect of reading, for reading had become for me the source only of disappointment & disillusionment, of a measure that seemed to turn my entire life upside down, disturb & distress me beyond compare, & make me think everything I had hitherto taken for granted about this world was all cack-handed & wrong. I understood how Mrs Gottliebsen would have felt if I hadn’t discovered Voltaire in the nick of time. She would have felt like me with books. Cheated. After all, it was reading all those romances & adventures as a young boy that had been the undoing of Jorgensen, making him think he could remake the world in the image of a book. It was reading Miss Anne’s idiotic missives that had led the Commandant into his follies; & it was reading all those works by Linnaeus & Lamarck that had made the porcupine fish think he had a sacred role in reordering a world that was only ever going to reorder him as the supreme example of a degenerate black skull.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish

“I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species & phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish (201).”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“Thus attired in the night of their grief, they prepared to depart into a morning she seemed determined not to relinquish.”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“How can power and ignorance sleep together?”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species and phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“His mode of speaking was largely incomprehensible, his tone was portentous, which is perhaps why he inevitably spoke in capital letters. Words existed in his speech as currants in a badly made bread-and-butter pudding - clusters of stodgy darkness”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“Billy Gould has always felt if something was worth doing, it was worth doing badly. Worry about doing it too well, he believed, & you may well be crippled by your ambition”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“I just wanted to tell a story of love & it was about fish & it was about me & it was about everything”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“Please don’t ask how I know such things, please: where fish are concerned I know everything - or as good as - & besides, it’s rude to interrupt when I am in the middle of telling you how that sorry crumpled dory began to flare up”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“He had come from the humblest of backgrounds, born in a cottage he had built with his own hands”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish