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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“And so at the beginning I learnt this: the words of a book are never the book”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings - why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope behind it we will find the truth of why. But there is no truth. There is only why. And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry. And behind it another, and another, until we arrive at oblivion.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“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

“We cannot be what we cannot dream.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“For memories too have their moment. There is a time for forgetting and a time for remembering and then even that time becomes a memory and, after a further time, nothing at all.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“Does time heal? Time does not always heal. Time scars.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“My mother and my father in their stories and their jokes, in their generosity and kindness to others, asserted the necessary illusion their lives might mean something in the endless tumult of this meaningless universe. For them to live, love had to exist, the love they valued above all things; they lived that love and they fought for that love and defended that love. With the passing of time, this illusion became their hard-won truth. It was a form of magic and they the magicians.

In my vanity, I had always thought of them as naive. Only now writing these words do I finally see the naivete was all mine.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7