The Pages Quotes

“While he managed to escape, they remain burdened by the history of their once colonized country, by the theft of the landscape on which their ancestors walked. The ground beneath their feet did not belong to them until they achieved independence in 1960, fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. The country had been plundered, some of its most precious works of art taken to museums in London and never returned. The people themselves were stolen to be sold as slaves.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Pages: A novel

“kind of impartial reporting in the media that gives falsehood equal billing. The balanced view. This is the era of distortion, when everything can be instantly refuted. A numbness has entered the vocabulary. All information has become unstable, as though everything contains an equal opposite. If something is said to be safe, then it must also be implied unsafe. The lie appeals to your fears. The truth is too much trouble.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Pages: A novel

“There is a weakness in the people after the war. They are open to slogans. The boundaries between fact and fiction have become so dissolved it’s hard to tell the difference. As if people have now developed an appetite for dishonesty. The lies they like to hear. Rogue words to match their resentment. They want the blame for their losses to be placed on the vulnerable, the unwelcome, those from elsewhere.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Pages: A novel

“Books have a way of dwelling like parasites, carried forth in the minds of readers, turning up by force of succession in later works of art. I was part of that living chain of ideas reaching into the future.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Pages: A novel

“book doesn’t want pity. Literature is a long game. There is no shame in living among the discarded. Obscurity can have its vivifying air, one of my author’s successors liked to say.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Pages: A novel

“casualties were to be taken out of the public domain because they were deemed bad for morale and they put people off war, encouraging a poor attitude toward death and suffering.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Pages: A novel

“woman’s voice was heard saying—beautiful time, beautiful time. What did she mean? Rejoicing at this new anti-intellectual age in which you could stop thinking, when you no longer had to find out anything you didn’t already agree with?”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Pages: A novel

“denounced in a summary trial, the name called out, giving a reason why they no longer fitted into the national vision, before their books were committed to the fire. All this was being broadcast by radio around the nation.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Pages: A novel

“some art commentators have described as the inner despair of a world laughing at its own misfortune.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Pages: A novel