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181 " It had been a day to die, not because it was a special day but because it wasn't, and every day was a day to die now, and the only question that pressed on them, as to who might be next, had been answered. "
― Richard Flanagan , The Narrow Road to the Deep North
182 " For the rest of his life he would yield to circumstance and expectation, coming to call these strange weights duty. "
183 " A man, good or bad, was magnificent. It was not possible that this thing that was nothing and would never change [death] could mean the end of everything that moved and changed within him - the good, the bad, the magnificent. Yet it did. "
184 " He...discovered that people's goodwill was frequently in inverse relationship to their position... "
185 " memorial coins. "
186 " He read books. He liked none of them. He searched their pages for Amy. She was not there. He went to parties. They bored him. He walked the streets, gazing into strangers' faces. Amy was not there. The world, in all its infinite wonder, bored him. He searched every room of his life for Amy. But Amy was not anywhere to be found. "
187 " The story enchanted me, and I took to carrying the book with me everywhere, as if it were some powerful talisman, as if it contained some magic that might somehow convey or explain something fundamental to me. "
― Richard Flanagan , Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
188 " My purpose holds, To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars until I die. "
189 " I tried to write what I remembered of the day. It sounded terrible and noble all at once. But it wasn't any of those things. "
190 " He read and reread ‘Ulysses’. The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world. "
191 " There was no meaning in it, not then and now now, but you can't write that, can you? "
192 " It did not fit with the new age of conformity that was coming in all things, even emotions, and it baffled him how people now touched each other excessively and talked about their problems as though naming life in some way described its mystery or denied its chaos. "
193 " ...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. "
194 " It did not mean those things he had been told it meant, that the soldier could now rest, that his job was done. What job? Why? How could anyone rest? "
195 " ...he understood the measure of his life now to be his capacity to believe in something - anything - other than what was happening in front of him. So they saw, but they did not see; so they heard, but they did not hear; and they knew, they knew it all, but still they tried not to know. "
196 " Life was a bit about luck. Mostly though, it was a stacked deck. Life was only about getting the next footstep right. "
197 " For beneath that delicate black powder something highly unusual was happening: the book’s marbled cover was giving off a faint, but increasingly bright purple glow. "
198 " But sometimes [love] was just there: ... he was ... shocked to know he had been lucky to live and know it, to love and be loved. "
199 " People kept on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only. "
200 " They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet. "