Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
Richard Flanagan
Top 10 Best Quotes
“So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them?”
“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.”
“Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.”
“definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others. I had endured too much to be reduced to an idea. Onto that pyre I threw so many, many words - that entire untrue literature of the past which had shackled & subjugated my as surely as the spiked iron collars & leg locks & jagged basils & balls & chains & headshaving - that had so long denied me my free voice & the stories I needed to tell. I no longer wished to read lies as to who & why I was. I knew who I was”
“The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security—national, individual, spiritual—wasn’t a bad joke being played on them by a bored and capricious destiny. To be told that there was no connection between then and now, that they didn't need to wear a black armband or have a bad conscience about their power and their wealth and everybody else’s lack of it; to feel rotten that no-one could or would explain why the wealth of a few seemed so curiously dependent on the misery of the many. We kindly pretended that it was about buying and selling chairs, about them asking questions about price and heritage, and us replying in like manner. But it wasn’t about price and heritage, it wasn’t about that at all. The tourists had insistent, unspoken questions and we just had to answer as best we could, with forged furniture. They were really asking, 'Are we safe?' and we were really replying, 'No, but a barricade of useless goods may help block the view.' And because hubris is not just an ancient Greek word but a human sense so deep-seated we might better regard it as an unerring instinct, they were also wanting to know, 'If it is our fault, then will we suffer?' and we were really replying, 'Yes, and slowly, but a fake chair may make us both feel better about it.”
“And when I had finished painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder & beauty left to go round as each fish was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking & plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming ever more impoverished of love & wonder & beauty in consequence, what, in the end, would be left?”
“Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations—that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls.”
“When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.”
“...& 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.”
“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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Book Keywords:
reading, environmentalism, words, consumption, inequality, social-justice, books, inner-conflict, definitions, colonialism, nature, change, money, life, tourism, writing, capitalism, literature, growth, psychology, dreams, rich-and-poor, ageing, commerce
