Christine

“All that is known is this: in front of his bookcase, while talking about matters of literary style, they kissed.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“Francis stayed with me and was patiently kind to me; but when we were fucking I began to cry again out of weakness and fear that he was fucking me, as a man does to a woman or out of fear that I liked it. I couldn’t find his mind, or his heart; he was away in his own travelling.”
― Helen Garner, Monkey Grip

“Chekhov’s line that ‘both the strong and the weak fall victim to their own relationships with one another’ has the ring of forbidden truth. Who would dare write such a line like that today? Who would dare even think it?”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7

“They should never have met, they were destined for each other, he would make her life and destroy her life and she would make her life in spite of his life, he would be an inexhaustible source of love and friendship for her for the next thirty-five years, he would madden her, he would win her and lose her and win her, she would be the one person he cared to see to the end, and to her immense surprise only after his death would she discover within herself the one thing she had never expected: a crack in the cup of life that opened into a desolation that was utter and inconsolable.”
― Richard Flanagan, Question 7