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Book: Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
Quotes of Book: Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel
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  1. Richard Flanagan _ Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel

    Perhaps if Tasmania had been a normal place where you had a proper job, spent hours in traffic in order to spend more hours in a normal crush of anxieties waiting to return to a normal confinement, and where no-one ever dreamt what it was like to be a seahorse, abnormal things like becoming a fish wouldn't happen to you.
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  2. Richard Flanagan _ Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel

    The only people who believe in straight roads are generals & mail coach drivers.
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  3. Richard Flanagan _ Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel

    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.
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  4. Richard Flanagan _ Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel

    To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping.
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  5. Richard Flanagan _ Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel

    Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation & reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults & is easily ivied over with paid praises
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  6. Richard Flanagan _ Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel

    Stories as written are progressive, sentence must build upon sentence as brick upon brick, yet the beauty of this life in its endless mystery is circular. Sun & moon, spheres endlessly circling. Black man, full circle; white man, bisected circle; life, the third circle, on & on, & round & round.
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  7. Richard Flanagan _ Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel

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

    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.
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  9. Richard Flanagan _ Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel

    -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!
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  10. Richard Flanagan _ Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel

    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.
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  11. Richard Flanagan _ Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel

    ...& 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.-pg 115
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  12. Richard Flanagan _ Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel

    When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.
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