Question 7 Quotes

“Money,’ my father would say, ‘is like shit. Pile it up and it stinks. Spread it around and you can grow things.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“It was a time of wonder and all things had the shape of miracles. And like a miracle, no evidence that it ever happened remains.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical: Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?3”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“They should never have met, they were destined for each other, he would make her life and destroy her life and she would make her life in spite of his life, he would be an inexhaustible source of love and friendship for her for the next thirty-five years, he would madden her, he would win her and lose her and win her, she would be the one person he cared to see to the end, and to her immense surprise only after his death would she discover within herself the one thing she had never expected: a crack in the cup of life that opened into a desolation that was utter and inconsolable.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“What remained was either silence or lies. Such as: the convicts and their children had all fled to the mainland during the gold rushes. Such as: the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were extinct, long gone, not one left on the island. Such as: everyone was descended from free settlers, not a touch of the tar brush or the convict stain on any of us.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“Though I tried to be honest, it was still happening and so it was dishonest. That’s what I couldn’t see then that I see now, that though it happened then it’s still happening now and it won’t ever stop happening, and that writing about it, that writing about anything, can’t be an opinion about what happened as if it had already happened when it is still happening, still unintelligible, still mysterious, and all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn’t.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“Fiction may be only fancy yet reality is often no more than the enthusiastic answer we give to our dreams and nightmares.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“War, my father told me decades later, is the ultimate obscenity.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“My parents were frugal not simply because they had to be careful, but because they saw little reason for making life about money.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“I wasn’t sure what my book was about. I may have said something about love, which had the virtue of not being untrue and being so broad as to be meaningless.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“I only write this book that you are now reading, no more than a love note to my parents and my island home, a world that has vanished, because over a century ago another writer wrote a book that decades later seized another mind with such force that it became a reality that reshaped the world. It was a story of horror that was his fear of love, complete love without measure or boundary, and he created in its place an idea of destruction without limit. In this way, the world begat a book that would in turn beget the world.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“Chekhov’s line that ‘both the strong and the weak fall victim to their own relationships with one another’ has the ring of forbidden truth. Who would dare write such a line like that today? Who would dare even think it?”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“We, like many other Tasmanian families, have Aboriginal relatives. But even if our cousin’s story were true we would not be Aboriginal. We were not brought up in the Aboriginal culture or an Aboriginal community, far less known the profound racism Aboriginal people endure. But who, then, are we? Why are we? For we, like so many other Tasmanian families, live in the shade of old stories that remain with us along with the new ones that accrue.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“The story of covering up Aboriginal pasts was a common one in Tasmania where such behaviour was for some a form of survival. There is no documentation to prove my father’s cousin’s story is true, but that doesn’t make it untrue. It leaves the story as an unanswerable question mark over my family.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“As he lay back in his tub that autumnal London morning, Leo Szilard wondered why the forecasts of writers sometimes prove to be more accurate than those of scientists.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“M— knew of literature: she had been to Cambridge in the 1950s where she knew Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. This was deeply impressive in 1980s Tasmania. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath may as well have been Count Vronsky and Anna Karenina.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“The dying, possessed of similar feelings towards their parents as the captain of the Enola Gay, were frequently heard to call one word over and over in their final agony, as they wandered lost and blind through the burning ruins of Hiroshima. Mother, they kept saying as charred skin fell like long strands of kelp off their bodies and heads, mother.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“When someone was down you helped, not out of altruism, but an enlightened selfishness: this way we all have a chance. The measure of the strongest was also the only guarantee of ongoing strength: their capacity to help the weakest. Mateship wasn’t a code of friendship. It was a code of survivors.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“All that is known is this: in front of his bookcase, while talking about matters of literary style, they kissed.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“Every old sock, as my father would sometimes say about odd couples, finds an old boot.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“Is it because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with lies we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts?”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“My illiterate grandfather understood something fundamental. “If you don’t have principles,” he once told my father, “you may as well jump off the end of the jetty.” Inscribe that above every parliament and board room entrance.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“Coming from a labouring family, a successful sportsman in his youth, something of a local champion, and having only just survived being a slave labourer, he felt no need to prove himself physically, had no interest in manual work and made no pretence he did. Nor did he have his idea of masculinity bound up in it; that is, if he had any idea of masculinity. Men amused him but women interested him. He spoke of women seriously, while men, for the most part, were no more than comic relief. He seemed bored by ideas of masculinity, or perhaps he had simply seen what boys playing at men led to and none of it seemed to him worth the candle.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“My parents were frugal not simply because they had to be careful, but because they saw little reason for making life about money. The notion of any relationship being what is now termed transactional, the idea of monetising aspects of your very life, would have seemed to them like some sort of emotional sickness or mental illness.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“Money,” my father would say, “is like shit. Pile it up and it stinks. Spread it around and you can grow things.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“She discovered very early that her chief strength as a writer was that she wrote as she felt, whereas most writers only write as others think. Along with her new name she stole from Ibsen the thoroughly non-English idea that ideas make the world spin around, and saved herself from the hubris of this fancy by having no original ideas of her own but only a gift for a certain ferocity of observation about those who did.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“And yet when we went to church, the essence of everything Mate respected, we always sat near the back, the place I seek out to this day at any event, a place where disrespect and comedy flourish, where the power and authority on the stage called the altar are mocked with whispered asides, jokes, mimicry; where one is always closest to the exit and the real world of sun, sea, of life itself. When it came time for Communion, the theatrical catharsis of the mass, I never saw my father partake. As a child this act of revolt felt powerful and unnecessarily nonconformist. The point of mass was mutual agreement—that much was clear even to a child—and any act of disagreement threatened to upset the whole edifice. Yet there he was, week after week, at church, sitting up in the last few rows and refusing at the apotheosis of the ceremony to agree. He didn’t disagree, or say no. He was no, the embodiment of no, the most powerful no there is: peaceful, passive, respectfully and adamantly no. Only now can I see how he said no to almost everything that life offered, not in rage or terror, not with vehemence or in indignation, but with a wry smile and a funny story, amused by the absurdity of the world. His revolt was self-contained and self-sustained. I don’t know how he did it.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“És perquè veiem el nostre món només en ombres, que ens envoltem de mentides que anomenem temps, història, realitat, memòria, detall, fets? I si el temps fos plural, i nosaltres també? I si descobríssim que comencem demà i vam morir ahir, que vam néixer de les morts dels altres i que la vida se’ns insufla a través d’històries que ens inventem a partir de cançons, de collages d’acudits, endevinalles i altres retalls?

El meu pare solia riure d’un company presoner que explicava que havia vist la llum de l’explosió de la bomba il·luminant el cel nocturn sobre el camp com si fos de dia.

La bomba atòmica d’Hiroshima va esclatar quan passava un minut d’un quart de nou del matí. Els que no el van veure mai són sempre els que veuen el passat amb més claredat.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7