Quotes from Sebastian Barry

It was not just because he was old, and looked old to them, but because he was a pensioned ghost from the strange past, a pointless survivor, an old soldier of forgotten wars. A remnant, with a torn gansey for a soul.

I cannot hardly speak to myself let alone to him. I feel the world is against me and at the same time I feel miserably at odds with everything. I have the awkward sense that if I open my mouth people will know me for the villain I am. At the same time, or in the next breath, tears keep surging up into my eyes, tears of some righteousness, because my mind keeps rising to righteousness. All in all I am like a ragged wind in a tangled hedge.

I thought it would be a good thing to follow John Redmond's words. I thought for my mother's sake, her gentle soul, for the sake of my own children, I might go out and fight for to save Europe so that we might have the Home Rule in Ireland in the upshot. I came out to fight for a country that doesn't exist, and now, Willie, mark my words, it never will.

When they came into their trench he felt small enough. The biggest thing there was the roaring of Death and the smallest thing was a man. Bombs not so far off distressed the earth of Belgium, disgorged great heaps of it, and did everything except kill him immediately, as he half expected them to do.

He carried a highly ecclesiastical umbrella, like something real and austere, that said its prayers at night in the hatstand. I

The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see.

He wondered suddenly and definitely for the first time in his life what words might be. Sounds and sense certainly, but something else also, a kind of natural music that explained a man's heart or heartlessness, words as tempered as steel, as soft as air.

No one minds life as long as they are not trying to leave it. Nor death, as long as they are not dying.

People endured horrors, and then they couldn't talk about them. The real stories of the world were bedded in silence.

The music of birds. I guess everything comes from that, the dances of simple country folk, the old songs that both cure and trouble the hearts of listeners.

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.

To the extend that a man with the soul filleted out of him could be happy. Since the things he had wished for were no more, he wished for nothing. He breathed in and out. That was all.

How I would like to say that I loved my father so much that I could not have lived without him, but such an avowal would be proved false in time. Those that we love, those essential beings, are removed from us at the will of the Almighty, or the devils that usurp him. 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.

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

Our smiles mostly for each other, and every stranger a possible demon or bear, till they proved otherwise

Like many a man in authority, he was sublimely happy as long as he was presenting his ideas, and as long as his ideas were meeting with agreement.

We were nothing to them. I think now of the great value we put on what we were and I wonder what does it mean when another people judge you to be worth so little you were only to be killed? How our pride in everything was crushed so small it disappeared until it was just specks of things floating away on the wind.

There are moments when I am pierced through by an inexplicable joy, as if, in having nothing, I have the world.

Do you know the grief of it? I hope not. The grief that does not age, that does not go away with time, like most griefs and human matters. That is the grief that is always there, swinging a little in a derelict house, my father, my father. I cry out for him.

The real comfort is that the history of the world contains so much grief that my small griefs are edged out, and are only cinders at the borders of the fire. I am saying this again because I want it to be true.

We may be immune to typhoid, tetanus, chickenpox, diphtheria, but never memory. There is no inoculation against that.

It would all go on, for ever, the little glories of life.

A matter of belief, the first day of spring, like Protestants and Catholics differing over the mother of God.

He liked it for its modesty among the bigger efforts. Like a human soul should be in the world, among elephants, galaxies.