Quotes from Barry Unsworth

Those confiding their pain cannot know at the outset how much they will be required to relive it.

I glimpsed the man's face with the shine of death on it. They laid him down there in the open. They had brought him there to be close to his death, I understood this also at the same moment. For who would wish to see a companion gasp his last on a jolting cart? We desire to keep the dying and the newly dead close before our eyes so as to give them full meed of pity. Our Lord was brought down to be pitied, on the Cross He was too far away.

Grief works its own perversions and betrayals; the shape of what we have lost is as subject to corruption as the mortal body...

A little bit of kindness goes a long way with women.

When you in de right you heart strong you no 'fraid nottin'.

The heart is a vital organ, but it is a faulty guide to conduct. It is the mind makes judgements and comparisons, furnishes evidence on which ideas of truth can be founded.

No latitude makes any difference to what men will do to other men, whether for gain or in the name of justice.

It is always through arbitrary combinations that experience enslaves the memory.

Wilson had been killed by everybody. It was this that made his death special, the children had been told. It was justice, it was all the people showing how much they hated this crime. Killing was justice when everybody joined in.

Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.

Useful thing a warrant. Murder and theft change their names if you have one.

Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good...

The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now than another aspect of that ancient urge - much older than the desire for truth - to command attention, dominate one's fellows.

The odds against this were tremendous, but Edith was not interested in the odds; people who thought about odds were unheroic and would never achieve anything. 20

Afterward I remembered these things very clearly, with that longing we feel sometimes to recover a state of life that we have lost for ever, though it is perhaps that we have lost it is all its value.

Justice is a mighty fine thing.

Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising.

And this was history now: heroic protest, concerted rebellion, execution of the tyrant, a new social order. It ran like a clear stream--useless to require it to resemble the viscous substance of truth.

If we make our own meanings, God will oblige us to answer our own questions: He will leave us in the void without the comfort of his word.

We desire to keep the dying and the newly dead close before our eyes so as to give them full need of pity. Our Lord was brought down to be pitied, on the Cross He was too far away.

To function efficiently - to function at all - we must concentrate our effects. Picturing things is bad for business, it is undynamic. It can choke the mind with horror if persisted in. We have graphs and tables and balance sheets and statement of corporate philosophy to help us remain busily and safely in the realm of the abstract and comfort us with a sense of lawful endeavor and lawful profit. And we have maps.

The player is always trapped in his own play but he must never allow the spectators to suspect this, they must always think that he is free. Thus the great art of the player is not in showing but in concealing.

When silence falls on the world then there is always one small sound that grows louder. I could hear the whispering and sighing of the snow and this sound was within me and without.

She talked in flat tones, keeping her mouth half-closed so that the words came out in a mutter without changing the lines of her face. Margaret had suffered much hardship and degradation of body and was unwilling now to offer the world anything superfluous.