Top 85 Sebastian Barry Quotes
#1. 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.
Sebastian Barry
#2. 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
Sebastian Barry
#3. Because faithfulness is not a human question, but a divine one.
Sebastian Barry
#4. I wonder if I were to have an X-ray at the little hospital, would the machine see my grief? Is it like rust, arheum about the heart?
Sebastian Barry
#5. I knew immediately something was terribly wrong, but you can know that and not allow the thought in your head, at the front of your head. It dances around at the back, where it can't be controlled. But the front of the head is where the pain begins.
Sebastian Barry
#6. The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone, we must be elaborating, improving, poeticising.
Sebastian Barry
#7. In those strange days when if anything unexpected could happen it probably would.
Sebastian Barry
#8. Clinton and his cigar was so much greater a man than Bush and his rifle.
Sebastian Barry
#9. 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
Sebastian Barry
#11. It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can.
Sebastian Barry
#12. The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see.
Sebastian Barry
#13. My own story, anyone's own story, is always told against me, even what I myself am writing here, because I have no heroic history to offer. There is no difficulty not of my own making.
Sebastian Barry
#14. Things that give you heart are rare enough, better note them in your head when you find them and not forget.
Sebastian Barry
#15. His first word, his first day at junior high. Nonsense things, the deepest, most important poetry of my life.
Sebastian Barry
#16. I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old, the first pattern in them, and cherish them for that.
Sebastian Barry
#19. I am dwelling on things I love, even if a measure of tragedy is stitched into everything, if you follow the thread long enough
Sebastian Barry
#20. It is very difficult to be a hero without an audience, although, in a sense, we are each the hero of a peculiar, half-ruined film called our life.
Sebastian Barry
#21. That is because at the close of the day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.
Sebastian Barry
#22. I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made up of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves.
Sebastian Barry
#23. For I did not want him to see, or to question me, for here contains already secrets, and my secrets are my fortune and my sanity.
Sebastian Barry
#24. A saying, since a saying arises always from the mouths of adults when a person was just a listening child, was supposed to carry you back there, like a magic trick or a scrap of a story, or something with something else still sticking to it.
Sebastian Barry
#25. 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.
Sebastian Barry
#26. 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.
Sebastian Barry
#27. The executed men were cursed, and praised, and doubted, and despised, and held to account, and blackened, and wondered at, and mourned, all in a confusion complicated infinitely by the site of war.
Sebastian Barry
#28. We may be immune to typhoid, tetanus, chicken-pox, diphtheria, but never memory. There is no inoculation against that.
Sebastian Barry
#29. Order returns to his addled head, and God no longer breaks eggs there in the morning" from "The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty
Sebastian Barry
#32. I hate writing, I hate pens and paper and all that fussiness. I have done well enough without it too, I think. Oh, I am lying to myself. I have feared writing. But books have saved me sometimes, that is the truth - my Samaritans.
Sebastian Barry
#33. How is that for some people drinking is a short-term loan on the spirit, but for others a heavy mortgage on the soul?
Sebastian Barry
#34. I am cold, even though the heat of early summer is adequate. I am cold because I cannot find my heart.
Sebastian Barry
#35. 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.
Sebastian Barry
#36. He carried a highly ecclesiastical umbrella, like something real and austere, that said its prayers at night in the hatstand. I
Sebastian Barry
#37. We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach.
Sebastian Barry
#38. Four men killed that day. The phrase sat up in Willie's head like a rat and made a nest for itself there
Sebastian Barry
#39. And whatever my life had been up to that day, it was another life after that. And that is the gospel truth.
Sebastian Barry
#40. But as I spoke to him, all I could feel was love. That was ridiculous. And I am deeply, deeply suspicious of it.
Sebastian Barry
#41. 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.
Sebastian Barry
#42. Other times you had a rake of our lads killed, and a rake of the old grey-suited devils, and you wouldn't know who had won the fucking thing, sure how could you tell boys?
Sebastian Barry
#43. Book I still possess in all the flotsam and ruckus of my life,
Sebastian Barry
#44. There's no soldier don't have a queer little spot in his wretched heart for his enemy, that's just a fact.
Sebastian Barry
#45. SPRING COMES INTO Massachusetts with her famous flame. God's breath warming the winter out of things
Sebastian Barry
#46. THERE'S OLD SORROW in your blood like second nature and new sorrow that maddens the halls of sense. Causes
Sebastian Barry
#47. I rose and moved towards him. You would have done the same yourself. It is an ancient matter. Something propels you towards sudden grief, or perhaps also sometimes repels. You move away. I moved towards it, I couldn't help it.
Sebastian Barry
#48. my mother's wits were now in an attic of her head which had neither door nor stair, or at least none that I could find.
Sebastian Barry
#49. Memory, I must suppose, if it is neglected becomes like a box room, or a lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not only from neglect but also from too much haphazard searching in them, and things to boot thrown in that don't belong there.
Sebastian Barry
#50. History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man's dominion of the earth.
Sebastian Barry
#51. A beard on a man is only a way of hiding something, his face of course, but also the inner matters, like a hedge around a secret garden, or a cover over a bird cage.
Sebastian Barry
#52. They had a house there below Kelsha, one of the old mud-walled jobs, that has long disappeared back into its garden of fuchsia and orange lilies that the mother herself had planted in her first days of marriage, as women do in their gardens, all full of hope.
Sebastian Barry
#53. I haven't really written my plays and books - I've heard them. The stories are there already, singing in your genes and in your blood.
Sebastian Barry
#54. To be alone, but to be pierced through with a kingly joy, now and then, as I believe I am, is a great possession indeed.
Sebastian Barry
#55. If it had been a great necessity, if it had been contingents of an army meeting to overwhelm the enemy by stealth, it might not have worked out so neatly. But fate it would seem is a perfect strategist and will work miracles of timing to assist our destruction.
Sebastian Barry
#56. Those that we love, those essential beings, are removed from us at the will of the Almighty, or the devils that usurp them.
Sebastian Barry
#57. Grizzled old bastard like him don't go providing death-bed transformations.
Sebastian Barry
#58. 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
Sebastian Barry
#59. The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea.
Sebastian Barry
#60. 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.
Sebastian Barry
#61. A man's memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can't do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.
Sebastian Barry
#62. 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.
Sebastian Barry
#63. The years return us gradually to the afflictions and shames of childhood, it is a curiosity of existence.
Sebastian Barry
#64. We were two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world.
Sebastian Barry
#65. three living men had seen horrors, and those who see horrors may do horrors just as bad, that is the law of life and war. Soon
Sebastian Barry
#66. 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.
Sebastian Barry
#67. who might have been a preacher had she not been cloven
Sebastian Barry
#68. Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.
Sebastian Barry
#69. 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?
Sebastian Barry
#70. I thought if I was going to live a life in this land I was accidentally born on, I must people it; I must have a history ... I'm looking for these people inside me, wherever they may be; that is my form of research.
Sebastian Barry
#71. What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking?
Sebastian Barry
#72. After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.
Sebastian Barry
#73. The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.
Sebastian Barry
#74. Our smiles mostly for each other, and every stranger a possible demon or bear, till they proved otherwise
Sebastian Barry
#75. 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.
Sebastian Barry
#76. 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.
Sebastian Barry
#77. There are moments when I am pierced through by an inexplicable joy, as if, in having nothing, I have the world.
Sebastian Barry
#78. It had been a war of kingly poisons, in the air, in the memory, in the blood.
Sebastian Barry
#79. It was an earthquake, tearing at the sons of America, trying to swallow them up. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful sons, that women had reared, had kissed and screamed at, and that fathers had stared intently in their cots, to see themselves in the wondrous mirrors of their babies.
Sebastian Barry
#81. Tears have a better character cried alone. Pity can sometimes be more wolf than dog.
Sebastian Barry
#82. Names, names, all passed away, forgotten, mere birdsong in the bushes of things.
Sebastian Barry
#83. There is seldom a difficulty with religion where there is friendship.
Sebastian Barry
#84. There is such solace in the mere sight of water. It clothes us delicately in its blowing salt and scent, gossamer items that medicate the poor soul
Sebastian Barry
#85. 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.
Sebastian Barry
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