Richard Flanagan Quotes

Life itself is controversy.

The unknowable creates the greatest controversies.

We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us; they drew like us. We wear essentially the same clothes against the cold.

Haunted since the day its discovery was projected all over the world in 1994, I, like many others, have always wanted to see inside the Chauvet cave, site of the world's earliest known cave art. Quite rightly, we will never go. It is closed to the public.

The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.

From an early age I was very, very fascinated by uncertainty.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

I like to imagine that the Neanderthals were all really good artists.

Well, I am not 100 percent sure of the definition of polemic, but it wasn't meant to convince anybody of anything.

I have always been fascinated by paleontology and prehistoric people, and I've always thought that one of the most intriguing moments in human history was the birth of artistic imagination. I always loved those cave paintings.

I cannot say who, precisely, came up with the idea of a Stone Age family.

Storytelling is as old as speech. It existed before humans first began to carve shapes in stones and press their hands upon the rocky walls of caves.

Even the earliest cave paintings in France and Spain had natural motion.

If we knew the meaning to everything that is happening to us, then there would be no meaning.

Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.

The most unquestionable right may be rendered doubtful, if once admitted to be a subject of controversy

It's productive and fun to try interpreting cave paintings, but ultimately, they can't teach us anything beyond what we imagine them to be.

Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them.

Even a cow creates ambiguous signifiers. The moo of mystery.

Movies work, in my opinion, on the best level when they're more enigmatic, when we don't say it's this or that and where it raises more questions than answers.

I think there is no one answer. It is still a struggle, there are tensions and I'm sure there are many people who would like to see these questions laid to rest or cease to be posed altogether.

I don't know the significance of this, but I find it very interesting.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

Life is a mystery,but man wants to reduce it to a problem!