Quotes from Sebastian Barry

in human affairs everything is hastiness and farewell.

The burden of getting older was borne alone

Something had happened to that sorrow. It had gone rancid in him, he thought; it had boiled down to something he didn't understand. The pith of sorrow was in the upshot a little seed of death.

He was looking into that strange place, the middle distance, the most mysterious, human, and rich of all distances.

So it was with the world, restless, kind of brutal. Always going on.

but creatures so long kennelled and confined find freedom and release very problematic attainments

I must admit there are 'memories' in my head that are curious even to me.

But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.

book I still possess in all the flotsam and ruckus of my life

But Fr Gaunt was so clipped and trim he had no antennae at all for grief. He was like a singer who knows the words and can sing, but cannot sing the song as conceived in the heart of the composer. Mostly he was dry. He spoke over young and old with the same dry music. But

The blood is intact in our bodies but we feel like we are bleeding into the earth.

What is this growing old, when even the engine that holds our despair and hope in balance begins to fail us.

I was well aware how famously or infamously secretive these old institutions can be, no more than ourselves, a mixture of worry, lost power, perhaps even concern. That the truth may not always be desirable, that one thing leads to another thing, that facts not only lead forward to resolution, but backwards into the shadows, and sometimes into the various little hells we make for each other.

Oh dear, oh dear, I sat there. I am sitting there still. I am old enough to know that time passing is just a trick, a convenience. Everything is always there, still unfolding, still happening. The past, the present, and the future, in the noggin eternally, like brushes, combs and ribbons in a handbag.

Because I thought it was still possible everything was all right. Why did I think that? Because I had not heard otherwise. I was in the middle of a mystery.

Hunger takes away what you are. Everything we were was just nothing then.

Now all my mother's things are dispersed also, and only this ladle has come from that time, passing through two or three sets of women's hands. It scoops the bath water well enough, the little boy's back glistens at me, with its slender spine, his skin as soft as gloves. I think of my grandmother, Bridget Dunne, and him, the past and the present. Her long set of bones lie in against the church in Kiltegan yard, his fidget below me.

A man's memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands.

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 needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man's dominion of the earth.

There is only a whisper of time between then and now, it seems to me. The clock of the heart does not follow the one on the mantelpiece.

We are not lovers rushing to embrace but there is a sense of terrifying union none the less, as if courage yearns to join with courage.

Names, names, all passed away, forgotten, mere birdsong in the bushes of things.

He was shivering like a Wicklow sheepdog in a snowy yard, though the weather was officially 'clement'. The first layer of clothing was his jacket, the second his shirt, the third his long-johns, the fourth his share of lice, the fifth his share of fear.

My fate, my fate as woeful as my father's, my ridiculous, heartless, funny fate.