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Book: The Narrow Road To The Deep North
Quotes of Book: The Narrow Road To The Deep
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  1. Richard Flanagan _ The Narrow Road To The Deep

    threatening apes. What was this room? How could he get out? The green blindfold was now wrapping around his throat, choking him. His heart was pounding. He
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  2. Richard Flanagan _ The Narrow Road To The Deep

    He just stared into the flames. 2 A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else. In his old age Dorrigo Evans never knew if he had read this or had himself made it up. Made up, mixed up, and broken down. Relentlessly broken down. Rock to gravel to dust to mud to rock and so the world goes, as his mother used to say when he demanded reasons or explanation as to how the world got to be this way or that. The world is, she would say. It just is, boy. He had been trying to wrest the rock free from an outcrop to build a fort for a game he was playing when another, larger rock dropped onto his thumb, causing a large and throbbing blood blister beneath the nail. His mother swung Dorrigo up onto the kitchen table where the lamp light fell strongest
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  3. Richard Flanagan _ The Narrow Road To The Deep

    name is Markos, he said. But call me Marco.
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  4. Richard Flanagan _ The Narrow Road To The Deep

    they together staggered through those days that built like a scream that never ended, a wet, green shriek Dorrigo Evans found perversely amplified by the quinine deafness, the malarial haze that meant a minute took a lifetime to pass and that sometimes it was not possible to recall a week of misery and horror.
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  5. Richard Flanagan _ The Narrow Road To The Deep

    Though every dead man is a reduction of their number, the thousand POWs who first left Changi as Evans' J Force-an assortment of Tasmanians and West Australians surrendered in Java, South Australians surrendered at Singapore, survivors of the sinking of the destroyer, HMAS Newcastle, a few Vics and New South Welshmen from other military misadventures, and some RAAF airmen-remain Evans' J Force. That's what they were when they arrived and that's what they will be when they leave, Evans' J Force, one-thousand souls strong, no matter, if at the end, only one man remains to march out of this camp. They are survivors of grim, pinched decades who have been left with this irreducible minimum: a belief in each other, a belief that they cleave to only more strongly when death comes. For if the living let go of the dead, their own life ceases to matter. The fact of their own survival somehow demands that they are one, now and forever.
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  6. Richard Flanagan _ The Narrow Road To The Deep

    He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf. But
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  7. Richard Flanagan _ The Narrow Road To The Deep

    He understood that he shared certain features, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him. He'd just had more success at living than at dying,
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  8. Richard Flanagan _ The Narrow Road To The Deep

    Nothing endures. Don't you see, Bonox? That's what Kipling meant. Not empires, not memories. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.
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  9. Richard Flanagan _ The Narrow Road To The Deep

    Lest we forget, we say, Bonox Baker said. Isn't that what we say, sir? We do, Bonox. Or incant. Perhaps it's not quite the same thing. So that's why it should be saved. So it's not forgotten. Do you know the poem, Bonox? It's by Kipling. It's not about remembering. It's about forgetting-how everything gets forgotten. Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget-lest we forget! Dorrigo Evans nodded to a pyre maker to set the bamboo alight. Nineveh, Tyre, a God-forsaken railway in Siam, Dorrigo Evans said, flame shadows tiger-striping his face. If we can't remember that Kipling's poem was about how everything gets forgotten, how are we going to remember anything else? A poem is not a law. It's not fate. Sir. No, Dorrigo Evans said, though for him, he realised with a shock, it more or less was.
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  10. Richard Flanagan _ The Narrow Road To The Deep

    Dorrigo glimpsed a complex mud of intimacies normally invisible to the world-the shared sleep, scents, sounds, the habits endearing and frustrating, the pleasures and sadnesses, small and large-the plain mortar that finally renders two as one. Her hair was pulled back
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  11. Richard Flanagan _ The Narrow Road To The Deep

    and how if she didn't see him for another thirty years she would still love him, how she would still love him if he was dead until she was dead too.
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  12. Richard Flanagan _ The Narrow Road To The Deep

    He had the sourdough smell of age. His chest sagged into shrivelled teats; his lovemaking was unreliable, yet she found it strangely wholesome in a way that defied sense.
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