Quotes from Sebastian Barry

That place where I was born was a cold town. Even the mountains stood away. They were not sure, no more than me, of that dark spot, those same mountains. There was a black river that flowed through the town, and if it had no grace for mortal beings, it did for swans, and many swans resorted there, and even rode the river like some kind of plunging animal, in floods.

Of course I was young, very young, but, as I remember it, no one is ever quite so old as a fifteen-year-old girl.

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

So then it got hotter. You can feel your back begin to cook. Pinch of salt and a few sprigs of rosemary and you got a dinner. God Almighty, the heat.

He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.

But as I spoke to him, all I could feel was love. That was ridiculous. And I am deeply, deeply suspicious of it.

It is worthless talking about what we have been spared by death. Death grins at that I am sure. Death of all creation knows the value of life.

There are some sufferings that we seem as a creature to forget, or we would never survive as a creature among all the other creatures.

The trust of those in dark need is forgiving work.

I am content to say that caught as I was, without rescuers as I was in that moment, there was a fierce, dark fury moving through me, wave upon wave, like the sea itself, that was bizarrely a comfort. My face maybe showing only a shadow of it, as faces will . . . Rage, dark rage, lightened by nothing.

Roseanne, Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self, would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me?

It is always worth itemizing happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers of happiness while you can.

I knew, I knew any proper, decent life was over. The word of a man like that was like a death sentence . . . I had known it all along, but it is a very different matter to know your sentence, and then to hear it spoken by your judge . . . Truest of all things, there was no one to help me, no one to stand at my side.

Men so sick they are dying of death.

Her greatest wish I should think was that I would remain exactly as I was, and how I regret that that was not to be. It was only for her roses that she wished for change, the strange moment of loral enchantment when the branch of a rose mutates, and shows a "sport," something new arising from the known rose. A leap in beauty.

Trench dirt didn't always wash out, I am sure.

And what else could we have come here for, except to sense these tiny victories? Not the big victories that crush and kill the victor. Not the wars and civil ructions, but the saving grace of a Hollandaise sauce that has escaped all the possibilities of culinary disaster and is being spread like a yellow prayer on a plump cod steak - victoriously.

I know she absolutely delights in the improvement of the weather, in the turning of the year.

There is a 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.

I am easy as a woman, taut as a man. All my limbs is broke as a man, and fixed good as a woman. I lie down with the soul of woman and wake with the same. I don't foresee no time where this ain't true no more.

His people had hogs there till the bottom fell out of hogs. The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see. So it was with the world, restless, kind of brutal. Always going on. Not waiting for no man.

I could feel myself melting away. I thought I was like water but I had no cup to hold me.

There's no soldier don't have a queer little spot in his wretched heart for his enemy, that's just a fact. Maybe only on account of him being alive in the same place and the same time and we are all just customers of the same three-card trickster.

We're holding hands then like lovers who have just met or how we imagine lovers might be in the unknown realm where lovers act as lovers without concealment.