Quotes from Sebastian Barry

In this makeshift place Willie Dunne discovered a peace of sorts. Yes the wild guns struck their great notes in the distance like the bells of a horrific city. Hearts asleep in the shires of England close upon the sea must heard them too. But he fell down between the boards of memory and sleep like a penny in an old floor. But he fell down between the boards of memory and sleep like a penny in an old floor. He lay there in the dust of nowhere, sunken and alone.

She was trying to wash the violence off of him.

A saying, since a saying arises always from the mouths of adults when a person was just a listening child, was supposed to carry you back there, like a magic trick or a scrap of a story, or something with something else still sticking to it.

The executed men were cursed, and praised, and doubted, and despised, and held to account, and blackened, and wondered at, and mourned, all in a confusion complicated infinitely by the site of war.

How is it that for some people drinking is a short-term loan on the spirit, but for others a heavy mortgage on the soul?

Other times you had a rake of our lads killed, and a rake of the old grey-suited devils, and you wouldn't know who had won the fucking thing, sure how could you tell boys?

Those that we love, those essential beings...it is as if a huge lump of lead were lain over the soul, such deaths, and where that soul was previously weightless, now is a secret and ruinous burden at the very heart of us. Because a lone person takes great comfort from her people, in the watches of the night, even the memory of them.

One moment, fine enough, sorrowing, but fine, sort of. The next, a big bulge of grief in my throat, so that if I had to speak in that moment my voice would be high and squeaky.

band, and it was as if, instead of conversation, he was talking to me through these more exotic instruments.

with ringworm, lice bites, and a million bugs. Men so sick they are dying

A lucky man is a man you want fighting near you and he gives the needful sense that the world is a thing of mysteries and wonders. That it's bigger than you, bigger than all the shit and blood you seen, That God might be in it somehow looking out for you.

Freedom I suppose they were after, following their instincts.

The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone, we must be elaborating, improving, poeticising.

It had been a war of kingly poisons, in the air, in the memory, in the blood.

Four men killed that day. The phrase sat up in Willie's head like a rat and made a nest for itself there