Quotes from Sebastian Barry

Why should a man help another man? No need, the world don't care about that. World is just a passing parade of cruel moments and long drear stretches where nothing going on but chicory drinking and whisky and cards.

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

And be thinking, remembering. Trying to. All difficult dark stuff, stories stuffed away, like old socks into old pillowcases. Not quite knowing the weight of truth in them much more. And things that I have let be a long time in the interests of happiness, or at least that daily contentment that I was once I do believe mistress of

The mind is a wild liar and I don't trust much in it that I find there.

The years return us gradually to the afflictions and shames of childhood, it is a curiosity of existence.

My own story, anyone's own story, is always told against me, even what I myself am writing here, because I have no heroic history to offer. There is no difficulty not of my own making.

I wonder if I were to have an X-ray at the little hospital, would the machine see my grief? Is it like rust, arheum about the heart?

Gods work! Silence so great it hurts your ears, colour so bright it hurts your staring eyes. A vicious ruined class of man could cry at such scenes because it seems to tell him that his life is not approved. The remnant of innocence burns in his breast like a ember of the very sun.

I am cold, even though the heat of early summer is adequate. I am cold because I cannot find my heart.

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

The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea.

We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach.

As I do not seem able much to heal, then maybe I can simply be a responsible witness to the miracle of the ordinary soul.

A child is never the author of his own history.

It would be a very good thing if occasionally I thought I knew what I was doing.

I miss her face, its beauty, and its beauty lost.

No one says too much and what is said is only light-hearted and bantering because we want to preserve our advantage over fear. Fear like a bear in the cave of banter. We're

I hate writing, I hate pens and paper and all that fussiness. I have done well enough without it too, I think. Oh, I am lying to myself. I have feared writing. But books have saved me sometimes, that is the truth - my Samaritans.

Memory, I must suppose, if it is neglected becomes like a box room, or a lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not only from neglect but also from too much haphazard searching in them, and things to boot thrown in that don't belong there.

my mother's wits were now in an attic of her head which had neither door nor stair, or at least none that I could find.

I had no desire to be seen by anyone, or talk to anyone. Sometimes out walking I would be in such a peculiar state of mind that I would rush home at the merest hint of another person.

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

I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made up of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves.

The knives opened the flesh like they were painting paintings of a new country, sheer plains of dark land, with the red rivers bursting their banks everywhere, till we were sloshing in God knows what and the dry earth was suddenly turned to noisy mud. The Shawnees ate the lights raw. Their mouths were sinkholes of dark blood.