QuoteProject
In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself.
Richard Flanagan
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Reading allows you to connect with profound ideas that transcend your own existence.

This quote reflects the transformative power of reading, suggesting that through literature, one can encounter concepts and experiences that are immense, intricate, and far beyond personal understanding. It emphasizes how engaging with written works can lead to a deeper awareness of existence and the universe's mysteries.

Themes

ReadingDivineMysteryLiteratureExistence

In practice

Example use cases

During a book club meeting to discuss the deeper themes of a novel.

More from Richard Flanagan

The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in order to halt its spread before it turns the soul of a society septic.
Richard FlanaganRead
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.
Richard FlanaganRead
My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.
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If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour, it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast, it is a political question.
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Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.
Richard FlanaganRead
I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.
Richard FlanaganRead

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Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.
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A Christian who withdraws into himself, hiding all that the Lord has given him, is not a Christian! I would ask the many young people present to be generous with their God-given talents for the good of others, the Church and our world.
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Power tends to confuse itself with virtue, and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor.
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There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
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When like-minded people, talking mostly with one another, end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk... If you put a bunch of rebels in a room and ask them to discuss rebellion, they'll get more extreme.
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