Richard Flanagan

Gould's Book of Fish

...For every tyrant born, so too are a thousand men willing to be enslaved... 67

But art is a punitive sentence, not a birthright... 91

Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated and in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate and shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete and 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 and him in his youth. 305