The Living Sea of Waking Dreams Quotes

“For so long they had been searching, liking, friending and commenting, emojiing and cancelling, unfriending and swiping and scrolling again, thinking they were no more than writing and rewriting their own worlds, while, all the time—sensation by sensation, emotion by emotion, thought by thought, fear on fear, untruth on untruth, feeling by feeling—they were themselves being slowly rewritten into a wholly new kind of human being. How could they have known that they were being erased from the beginning?”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

“She sometimes wondered, Francie continued, if parents’ mistake was to make too much of their importance to their children, and their children repeat the same mistake.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

“I mean, is translating experience into words an achievement at all? Or is it just the cause of all our unhappiness? Is it our tragedy and our ongoing conceit? The world gets carried away with words, phrases, and elaborate paragraphs. One word leads to another and soon enough you have affairs, wars, genocide and the Anthropocene.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

“Instagram, blessed Novocaine of the soul! Foodholidayssmilinggroupsshopping.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

“The lie was one they - children, doctors, nurses - all encouraged. The lie was that postponing death was life. That wicked lie had now imprisoned Francie in a solitude more absolute and perfect and terrifying than any prison cell.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

“It surprised Anna and it upset Anna how small her life was each time she tried to tell it, to shape it in order to escape it, how it always came out too quickly as a few dispiriting sentences so easily dismissed.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

“the measure of us is not what we say or think, but what we are when we are tested by suffering.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

“It was as if words were now a wall between people rather than a bridge, and if you could just build the wall high enough no one would see the growing desert of the vanished on the other side. It was as though everyone was using words to avoid using words for what words were used for.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

“And when the first famines began, they were elsewhere, and the growing numbers of wars were elsewhere, the atrocities and horrors were elsewhere, and elsewhere is always the fault of others, and others were always less able and more stupid than them, and so they didn’t worry too much about these things either, nor were they overly concerned when refugees fleeing these horrors were turned away from their borders or incarcerated because, with their two eyes and noses, it was clear they weren’t really like them at all, but freaks.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

“They felt their own judgements absolute and the judgements of others idiocy or wickedness deserving the worst punishment. It was as if everyone had to believe their own story—any story, really—because if they stopped believing there would only be reality left to deal with. No one doubted, or was unsure; every individual was infallible because it was their truth, and so there could be no truth and the world was wrong.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

“She was myrtle. She was pencil pine.
She was richea and scoparia and cushion plant, and each in turn vanished, tree grass moss; all these things in turn she became always had been without knowing, all of it all the world in her, all of it all of her vanishing -- shot bulldozed logged mined developed poisoned choked beaten burning burnt.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

“The lie was one they - children, doctors, nurses - all encourage. The lie was that postponing death was life. That wicked lie had now imprisoned Francie in a solitude more absolute and perfect and terrifying than any prison cell.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

“The lie was that postponing death was life. That wicked lie had now imprisoned Francie in a solitude more absolute and perfect and terrifying than any prison cell.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

“Really, the new hand felt normal, no different from her old hand. It was impossible to say why she felt so oddly about it, thought Anna. It was her hand, after all. Except somehow, looking at it, in a way she had no words to describe, it no longer was.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams