Quotes from Sebastian Barry

It's a dark thing when the world sets no value on you or your kin, and then Death comes stalking in, in his bloody boots.

and the force of public opinion, tiny though the public here may be, is a thing so violent violence is not needed to carry it.

A child is never the author of his own history. I suppose this is well known.

They stood there two feet apart in all that vale of tears, one man asking another how he was, the other asking how the other was, the one not knowing truly what the world was, the other not knowing either. One nodded to the other now in an expression of understanding without understanding, of saying without breathing a word. And the other nodded back to the other, knowing nothing. Not this new world of terminality and astonishing dismay, of extremity of ruin and exaggeration of misery.

John Cole, the keel of my boat. Thomas the oars and the sails.

Then his face opened again like that spot in the woods touched suddenly by stray sunlight.

might be a later addition.

has been changed. The jars of boiled sweets still hypnotize the children after school. Even the newcomers

Hunger takes away what you are.

moment in the history of every beaten child when his mind parts with hopes of dignity – pushes off hope like a boat without a rower, and lets it go as it will on the stream, and resigns himself to the tally stick of pain. This is a ferocious

We washed our shirts and trews and when we went out to get them off the bushes, they were as stiff as corpses in the cold. Some poor cows froze where they were standing like they had peered into the face of old Medusa. Men lost the wages of three years hence at cards. They bet their boots and then pled for the pity of the winner. The piss froze as it left our peckers and woe betide the man with an obstruction or hesitation to their shit, because soon they had a brown icicle on their arse

Else what was happening was, I was going to be beaten up every time I was in town. It was English kept me from that. Some straggly farmhand might look at you and see the dark skin and the black hair and think that gave him a right to knock you down and kick you. No one saying boo to him for that. No sheriff or deputy neither.

Order returns to his addled head, and God no longer breaks eggs there in the morning" from "The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

Whitemen in the main just see slaves and Indians. They don't see the single souls. How all are emperors to those that love them.

The Bible is like a particular music, you cannot always catch the tune of it.

We knew we was just fragments of legend and had never really existed in that town. There is no better feeling.

We're strange people, soldiers stuck out in wars. We ain't saying no laws in Washington. We ain't walking on yon great lawns. Storms kill us, and battles, and the earth closes over and no one need say a word and I don't believe we mind. Happy to breathe because we seen terror and horror and then for a while they ain't in dominion.

My story hurries me on.

A direct question in the company of men is in most contexts a sort of insult, something you learn young in Sligo bars.

A human person finds a little medicine in another's sadness. So I found. But it's not so strange because the world is mysterious anyhow.

How difficult it is to live.

Little sins of omission that loom large now. You could go mad.

He smiled at me with his barn-wide smile. I knew he didn't think I was a cur of an Indian, not at all. He knew what I was.

contract of friendship.