Quotes from Sebastian Barry

To remember sometimes is a great sorrow, but when the remembering has been done, there comes afterwards a very curious peacefulness. Because you have planted your flag on the summit of the sorrow. You have climbed it.

Like there was a waterfall at the edge of their world that a woman could be washed over, like an invisible Niagara in daily life. A vast high wall of boiling, misty water.

Life wants you to go down and suffer far as I can see. You gotta dance around all that. A child must come out to dance and dance around all obstacles and dance in the end the creaky quadrille of age.

You have got to remember how dangerous the world is and that here is a mighty patch of danger and you have got to live through it.

a person I have come to accept in the way of things here, which, if they can't be changed, they must be endured.

Slowly he edges nearer. He reaches out a hand, so openly and plainly that I believe I am going to expire. The held in breath of the audience is not let out again. Half a minute passes. It is unlikely any of them could of holded their breath like this underwater. They have found new size in their lungs. Down down we go under them waters of desire.

I did not intend to cry out, but as you will see these small actions, associated in most people's minds with the ease and happiness of life, are to me still like knives in my heart to think of.

Trouble always comes and no use wishing it didn't. Thing is, to get through it – and out the other side. If there is another side.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Life, Liberty.

After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continously happy in it.

Lige Magan's motto was, two glasses heaven, three glasses hell.

Grief is about two years long, they say, it is a platitude out of manuals for grievers. But we are in mourning for our mothers before even we are born.

Thus we inaugurate the best time in the little kingdom we have pitched up against the darkness.

His first word, his first day at junior high. Nonsense things, the deepest, most important poetry of my life.

with the yellow fingers from the coffin nails they smoked

I started to tremble, it was a moment in your life when daily things pass away from you, when all your concerns seem to vanish, and you are allowed by God a little space of clarity and grace. When you see that God himself is in your wife and in your children, and they hold in trust for you your own measure of goodness. And in the manner of your treatment of them lies your own salvation.

Can't get that drummer boy out of my inner eye. He's stuck in there like a floating thing. I guess he should a got more from living than he did. Brave lad out of Missouri and cheery and not expecting nothing. His head rolling about a lonesome meadow in Virginia. Bright eyes and now they put him in a hole. By God it wouldn't even be good enough to weep for him.

Killing hurts the heart and soils the soul.

Terror is just the cousin of courage

The real comfort is that the history of the world contains so much grief that my small grief are edged out, and are only cinders at the borders of the fire.

In those strange days when if anything unexpected could happen it probably would.

Those that we love, those essential beings, are removed from us at the will of the Almighty, or the devils that usurp them.

In there, she said, humanity was a book without a cover.

I am as late as the rabbit in Lewis Carroll.