Barry Unsworth > Quotes

“Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“There are no stronger fetters than those we forge for ourselves.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Numbers of men are getting richer and greater numbers are getting poorer. Alas, both classes have higher expectations these days. In Short, sir, there has been a leap in bribes.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Doubt is the ally of hope, not its enemy, and together they made all the blessing he had.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Only way to live here is day by day, same as anywhere.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“It is everyone's bounden duty to try to get more than they have got already. If you have got two shillin' you try to make it into four shillin' . . . there is no end to it.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former . . .”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“The flood of cheap manufactures, for which the people have no need,destroys their industries. They become dependent on this trade and the demand for goods can only be met by enslaving their fellows.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“But that sacred hunger we spoke of justifies all.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“No latitude makes any difference to what men will do to other men, whether for gain or in the name of justice.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“I glimpsed the man's face with the shine of death on it. They laid him down there in the open. They had brought him there to be close to his death, I understood this also at the same moment. For who would wish to see a companion gasp his last on a jolting cart? We desire to keep the dying and the newly dead close before our eyes so as to give them full meed of pity. Our Lord was brought down to be pitied, on the Cross He was too far away.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“Wickedness is too common in the world
for us to think much of why and wherefore.
It is more natural to ask about the rarer thing
and wonder why people sometimes do good.”
― Barry Unsworth

“Money is sacred as everyone knows... So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it. Once a man is in debt he becomes a flesh and blood form of money, a walking investment. You can do what you like with him, you can work him to death or you can sell him. This cannot be called cruelty or greed because we are seeking only to recover our investment and that is a sacred duty.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Grief works its own perversions and betrayals; the shape of what we have lost is as subject to corruption as the mortal body...”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“It is always through arbitrary combinations that experience enslaves the memory.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“A little bit of kindness goes a long way with women.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“I was born for better things.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“A man may go through life and remain ignorant of himself he may think himself as other than he truly is and he may die with this illusion still intact because no circumstance of his life has obliged him to revise it.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising.”
― Barry Unsworth

“At the same time he could hardly believe what he had been reading. It struck him as verging on madness. This wild confession, this owing to a crime so outlandish, so totally different from the true ones of mating and theft of the negroes, outraged him with its insolence and perversity. In the conflict of these feelings Erasmus was swept by doubt and loneliness. His whole being seemed under threat of dissolution. What became of law, of legitimacy, of established order, if a man could assume such attitudes of private morality, decide for himself where his fault lay? It turned everything upside down. He could think of nothing more damnable. And yet… He remembered suddenly the second, rarer smile his cousin had, the one that came slowly, transforming his face. Briefly, unwillingly, Erasmus glimpsed the possibility of freedom.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“The odds against this were tremendous, but Edith was not interested in the odds; people who thought about odds were unheroic and would never achieve anything. 20”
― Barry Unsworth, Land of Marvels

“The heart is a vital organ, but it is a faulty guide to conduct. It is the mind makes judgements and comparisons, furnishes evidence on which ideas of truth can be founded.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Those confiding their pain cannot know at the outset how much they will be required to relive it.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“This praise, though far from fulsome, gave me pleasure and that is to my shame. But there was something in him, some power of spirit, that made me want to please him. Perhaps, it occurs to me now, it was no more than the intensity of his wish. Men are distinguished by the power of their wanting. What this one wanted became his province and his meal, he governed it and fed on it from the first moment of desire. Besides, with the perversity of our nature, being tested had made me more desire to succeed, though knowing the enterprise to be sinful.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever...”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“The successful cannot be unhappy -- it was a contradiction in terms.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“A man can live free and not seek to limit the freedom of others so long as no one seeks to limit his.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Justice is a mighty fine thing.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“When you in de right you heart strong you no 'fraid nottin'.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Useful thing a warrant. Murder and theft change their names if you have one.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good...”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now than another aspect of that ancient urge - much older than the desire for truth - to command attention, dominate one's fellows.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger