Quotes from Sebastian Barry

My head is already stuffed with grief I suppose like a pomegranate with its red seeds. I can only bleed grief, having no room for more.

What he must have suffered, in his lovely English privacy.

my mother had shown me how to shuck off fear and have the courage of a thousand moons.

You only had to look like you done something wrong in America and they would hang you, if you were poor.

Grizzled old bastard like him don't go providing death-bed transformations.

Thousands die everywhere always. The world don't care much, it just don't mind much. That's what I notice about it. There is that great wailing and distress and then the pacifying waters close over everything, old Father Time washes his hands. On he plods to the next place.

who might have been a preacher had she not been cloven

I am clearly content to be beyond help.

Out there in the silent prairie with only the perpetual wind for music and he tells us to charge. Ain't there an old story about a windmill?

But I suspect the reported number of good novels this year is a result of 9/11 and all the other alarums of recent years. I think it set a certain gear into movement, unseen, silent, at the heart of many writers. Writers with children, writers with that hope of a peaceful century; a sort of literary battle stations. I was not surprised to hear Ali Smith describe her wonderful book The Accidental as a war book. Sebastian Barry, in interview with TMO (2005)

We may be black-hearted men when our turn comes but there is a seam in men called justice that nothing burns off complete. Caught-His-Horse-First

He was looking into that strange place, the middle distance, the most mysterious, human, and rich of all distances. And from his eyes came slowly tears, immaculate human tears, before the world touches them. River, window and eyes.

And a man who can make himself merry in the face of those coming disasters that assailed him, as disasters do so many, without grace or favour, is a true hero.

All that remains of me now is a rumour of beauty.

She was altered by time and how he wished he was to be the man to comfort her in that and avow to her that no lessening of youth would bring a lessening of love

This (white settlers) was the section of humanity that was favored in that place, the Indians had no place no more there. Their tickets of passage were rescinded and the bailiffs of God took back the papers of their soles.

Some friendships though, even strong and interesting ones, seem to have quite a short term, and cannot be prolonged.

I smiled at him my oldest old-woman smile, as if I did not quite understand.

I was so affected by hearing another human speak to me with grace and respect.

I started to cry, not like a child, but like the old woman I am, slow, slight tears that no one sees, no one dries.

There was nothing to see but in my mind's eye I could see everything, because she had supplied the ancient cinema of this place.

THERE'S OLD SORROW in your blood like second nature and new sorrow that maddens the halls of sense. Causes

A Ford motorcar is a magical thing in the night with the spraying lamps against the pitch road and the smell of metal and perfume under the clothy roof.

Some men make flower beds, and some men kill.