Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Richard Flanagan

Quote by Richard Flanagan

Work

Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Richard Flanagan
Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan is an Australian novelist known for his profound character development and rich narrative techniques. His works often explore themes of history, family, and personal identity, with novels like 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' and 'The Rich Boy' receiving widespread acclaim. more

You May Also Like

“She hadn't had a bite of her dinner. I'd even curled the pasta into a little linguine nest in the center of each bowl. My mother's was still perfect and round and cold. The sauce had darkened. "This is delish," she said. "But it needs red wine. I tell you because I love you and you should know for the future." She went on about deglazing and how it brings out the earthy taste of the onions and never use wine you wouldn't drink yourself and a young, robust wine is what you use in red sauces, nothing fortified or dry, for example.”

AdviceCookingMother And DaughterHow ToWines
Book:Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots
Create image

“Joe himself remained the same as ever, picking his early fruit and laying it out in crates, making jam from windfalls, pointing out wild herbs and picking them when the moon was full, collecting bilberries from the moors and blackberries from the railway banking, preparing chutney from his tomatoes, piccalilli from his cauliflowers, lavender bags for sleeplessness, wintergreen for rapid healing, hot peppers and rosemary in oil and pickled onions for the winter. And, of course, there was the wine. Throughout all that summer Jay smelled wine brewing, fermenting, aging. All kinds of wine: beet root, pea pod, raspberry, elderflower, rose hip, jackapple, plum, parsnip, ginger, blackberry. The house was a distillery, with pans of fruit boiling on the stove, demijohns of wine waiting on the kitchen floor to be decanted into bottles, muslins drying on the clothesline for straining the fruit, sieves, buckets, bottles, funnels, laid out in neat rows ready for use.”

SpicesHerbsFruits And VegetablesWines
Book:Blackberry Wine
Create image

“Vowels were something else. He didn't like them, and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you knew pretty much where they stood, but you could never trust a vowel. To the old pitcher, they were like his own best knuckle ball come back to haunt him. In, out, up, down - not even the pitcher, much much less the batter, knew which way it would break. He kept swinging and missing.”

BaseballLearning To ReadVowels
Author:Jerry Spinelli
Create image

“A, Black, E, white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels, Someday I shall tell of your mysterious births: A, black velvety corset of dazzling flies Buzzing around cruel smells, Gulfs of shadow; E, white innocence of vapors and of tents, Spears of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of Queen Anne's lace; I, purples, spitting blood, smile of beautiful lips In anger or in drunkin penitence; U, waves, divine shudderings of green seas, The calm of pastures dotted with animals, the pece of furrows Which alchemy prints on wide, studious foreheads; O, sublime Bugle full of strange piercing so und, Silences crossed by Worlds nad by Angels: - O the Omega, the violet ray of her Eyes!”

Vowels
Author:Arthur Rimbaud
Create image

“We also composed using what we called vowel movement - very important for songwriters. The sounds that work. Many times you don't know what the word is, but you know the word has got to contain this vowel, this sound. You can write something that'll look really good on paper, but it doesn't contain the right sound. You start to build the consonants around the vowels. There's a place to go ooh and there's a place to go daah. And if you get it wrong, it sounds like crap. It's not necessarily that it rhymes with anything at the moment, and you've got to look for the rhyming word too, but you know there's a particular vowel involved.”

SongwritingRhymeWriting ProcessVowels
Book:Life
Create image

“It was the custom, rigidly adhered to," Luke said, turning the brandy in his glass, "for the public executioner, before a quartering, to outline his knife strokes in chalk upon the belly of his victim--for fear of a slip, you understand." I would like to hit her with a stick, Eleanor thought, looking down on Theodora's head beside her chair; I would like to batter her with rocks. "An exquisite refinement, exquisite. Because of course the chalk strokes would have been almost unbearable, excruciating, if the victim were ticklish." I hate her, Eleanor thought, she sickens me; she is all washed and clean and wearing my red sweater. "When the death was hanging by chains, however, the executioner..." "Nell?" Theodora looked up at her and smiled. "I really am sorry, you know," she said. I would like to watch her dying, Eleanor thought, and smiled back and said, "Don't be silly.”

DeathViolenceRocksHatredTelepathyTicklishExecutionerPosession
Book:The Haunting of Hill House
Create image