Quotes from Sebastian Barry

Krezy, he pronounced it, krezy. Pure Roscommon. Pure Ghana.

The greatest imperfection is in our inward sight, that is, to be ghosts unto our own eyes.' Sir Thomas Browne, Christian Morals

It was all the one. Where John Cole abided, there was to be found Thomas with his simple heart. Their love was the first commandment of my world - Thou shalt hope to love like them. We have all to meet many souls and hearts along the way - we are obliged to - we must pray we can encounter one or two Thomases and John Coles on that journey. Then we can say life was worth the living and love was worth the gamble.

They had a house there below Kelsha, one of the old mud-walled jobs, that has long disappeared back into its garden of fuchsia and orange lilies that the mother herself had planted in her first days of marriage, as women do in their gardens, all full of hope.

But we only have one path across the mire of remembrance in general.

Saloon' a sign said, no more nor less. And underneath, on a smaller sign hanging from a string, 'Clean boys wanted.' Look, see, says John Cole, who didn't have the great learning I had, but little nonetheless. Well, he says, by my mother's loving heart, we do fulfill half that requirement.

The atomic bomb brings the men home from every quarter of the earth because the war is not so much over as stunned back into history...

In those days, the odour of cooking meat turned my stomach. But boiling meat took the biscuit. Why, I don't know, since my mother relished all forms of meat, even offal and innards that would frighten a surgeon. She would dine quite happily on a lamb's heart.

The first cousin of an order is chaos. Terror is just the cousin of courage too.

For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth. History

This is a ferocious truth, because a child knows no better. A child is never the author of his own history. I suppose this is well known.

They say that we come from apes and maybe it is the residing animal in us that knows things deep down that we almost don't realise we know.

I wonder why that is. I wonder why anything is.

Terrible, dreepy, dark February weather I remember, and the worst, most frightened days of my life.

What the deer feels in the second she sees the hunter with his gun I seemed to feel for long stretches of hours and days. I was poised for flight like any creature might be but where I was to flee I didn't know.

A savage sense entered me, of being of such small account in the world that I wasn't to be helped, that priest and woman and man had put out an edict that I wasn't to be helped, I was to be left to the elements, just as I was, a walking animal, forsaken. Maybe it was then that some part of me leapt away from myself, something fled from my brain, I don't know.

Heroic things had been suggested to them, and though they were not heroes as you might read about in old Greek stories, their hearts, such as they were, answered.

A memory so clear, so wonderful, so beyond the bounds of possibility. I know it. My head is as clear as a glass.

thought how curious it was how people leave a few traces as they go, that can be looked at and puzzled over, but whether ever properly understood, I doubted.

Bexhill is only about fifty miles from Gatwick in that part of England so English it is almost something else, unnameable. The names reek of candyfloss and old battles.Brighton, Hastings.

Morality has its own civil wars, with its own victims in their own time and place.

Dedication Epigraph

Why am I telling you all this? Because of course it might explain if not excuse her enormous desire that Tom should not endure so confused a life as hers, and was a slave to her own ideas of rectitude, as only a person who thinks they have fallen can be.

If you can own nothing, he owned it.