Sebastian Barry Quotes

And whatever my life had been up to that day, it was another life after that. And that is the gospel truth.

~ Sebastian Barry

It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.

~ Sebastian Barry

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.

~ Sebastian Barry

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

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

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

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

I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.

~ Sebastian Barry

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

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

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

Trench dirt didn't always wash out, I am sure.

~ Sebastian Barry

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

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

I guess love laughs at history a little.

~ Sebastian Barry

A child is never the author of his own history.

~ Sebastian Barry

And what else could we have come here for, except to sense these tiny victories? Not the big victories that crush and kill the victor. Not the wars and civil ructions, but the saving grace of a Hollandaise sauce that has escaped all the possibilities of culinary disaster and is being spread like a yellow prayer on a plump cod steak - victoriously.

~ Sebastian Barry

But I had no idea what I looked like. Children may feel epic and large to theyselves and yet be only scraps to view.

~ Sebastian Barry

The trust of those in dark need is forgiving work.

~ Sebastian Barry

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

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

with ringworm, lice bites, and a million bugs. Men so sick they are dying

~ Sebastian Barry

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

And be thinking, remembering. Trying to. All difficult dark stuff, stories stuffed away, like old socks into old pillowcases. Not quite knowing the weight of truth in them much more. And things that I have let be a long time in the interests of happiness, or at least that daily contentment that I was once I do believe mistress of

~ Sebastian Barry

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

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

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

The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone, we must be elaborating, improving, poeticising.

~ Sebastian Barry

Everything bad gets shot at in America, says John Cole, and everything good too.

~ Sebastian Barry

His people had hogs there till the bottom fell out of hogs. The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see. So it was with the world, restless, kind of brutal. Always going on. Not waiting for no man.

~ Sebastian Barry

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

~ Sebastian Barry

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

Men so sick they are dying of death.

~ Sebastian Barry

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

Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.

~ Sebastian Barry

In the darkness as we lie side by side John Cole's left hand snakes over under the sheets and takes a hold of my right hand. We listen to the cries of the night revellers outside and hear the horses tramping along the ways. We're holding hands then like lovers who have just met or how we imagine lovers might be in the unknown realm where lovers act as lovers without concealment.

~ Sebastian Barry

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

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

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

I am cold, even though the heat of early summer is adequate. I am cold because I cannot find my heart.

~ Sebastian Barry