Kevin Barry > Quotes

“Before forty, you think that exhaustion is something like a long-lasting hangover. But at forty you learn all about it. Even your passions exhaust you.”
― Kevin Barry

“Tricky the paths a long love might follow, like the spiral down twists of a raindrop on a windowpane.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“And the view was suddenly clear to me. The world opened out to its grim beyonds and I realized that, at forty, one must learn the rigors of acceptance. Capitalize it: Acceptance. I needed to accept what was put before me--be it a watery grave in Ireland's only natural fjord, or a return to the city and its grayer intensities, or a wordless exile in some steaming Cambodian swamp hole, or poems or no poems, or children or not, lovers or not, illness or otherwise, success or its absence. I would accept all that was put in my way, from here on through until I breathed my last.”
― Kevin Barry

“But now he came up to himself slowly again—it was like rising through heavy water—and he was warmed by one of the great consolations: nothing very terrible lasts for very long.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“It’s freedom, she says. It’s poverty, Charlie says. Poverty is always for free.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“It was one of those summers you’re nostalgic for even before it passes. Pale, bled skies. Thunderstorms in the night. Sour-smelling dawns. It brought temptation, and yearning, and ache – these are the summer things.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“There is a stab of awareness at the beginning and at the end of love, and the feeling precisely replicates—it’s a twinge of cold certainty at either end of the affair, and it is twice terrifying.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“A troubled silence descends—the old times are shifting again; they are rearranging like fault lines. The past will not relent.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“Fucking Ireland. Its smiling fiends. Its speaking rocks. Its haunted fields. Its sea memory. Its wildness and strife. Its haunt of melancholy. Its haunt of melancholy.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“He sits in his tomb up top of the Newport hotel. It contains a crunchy armchair, a floppy bed, several arrogant spiders, a mattress with stains the shapes of planets and an existential crisis. But he wouldn’t want to sound too French about it.”
― Kevin Barry, Beatlebone

“It's about what you've got to put yourself through to make anything worthwhile. It's about going to the dark places and using what you find there.”
― Kevin Barry, Beatlebone

“There comes a time when you just have to live among your ghosts. You keep the conversation going. Elsewise the broad field of the future opens out as nothing but a vast emptiness.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“She sensed older presences as she walked. She knew by a cold stirring that here they had made their fires, and here their cattle had grazed, and here they ate periwinkles and oysters from the shell, and they had this burning salt on their lips, and felt this old rain, and made their cries of love and war, and roamed in hordes; their little kingdoms here were settled, and disassembled; by night, in our valley, the wolves had bayed.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“He was more than possessed by his crimes and excesses – he was the gaunt accumulation of them.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“The days were cold as evil but the evenings spread magic from the sea inwards and stretched out and tapped the place until it was open to our dreaming.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“But if he has nothing else to his name, he has his regrets, and these are not without value to the martyr's self-portrait displayed in his mind's eye.

We come into the world on the top of a scream and the wave of our poor mother's roaring.

She had a smile like a home-made explosive device.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“Watch for the glamorous sentence that appears from nowhere - it might have plans for you. Watch out for the clauses that are elegantly strung , for the string of words bejewelled. Watch out for the ripe language-it means your words may be about to go off?”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“When we move by water, our hearts are moved. We are complicated fucking machines.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“He was a country boy with his wires twisted all wrong. He should have never been let near a city.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“In the native way he was tormented now by his own happiness.”
― Kevin Barry, That Old Country Music

“We come into the world on the tip of a scream and the wave of our poor mothers’ roaring.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“There is a stab of awareness at the beginning and at the end of love, and the feeling precisely replicates – it’s a twinge of cold certainty at either end of the affair, and it is twice terrifying.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“Never name the moment for happiness or it will pass by.”
― Kevin Barry, Beatlebone

“The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“And now from the vantage of his years a terrible swoon comes down on him; Cynthia, for a moment, descends all the way through him. This is not a rare occurrence. He will never lose the feeling of the love that they had together, or the nausea of its absence. Hate is not the answer to love; death is its answer.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“She gathered into a bundle of herself, drew up her legs—Dilly had a complicated arrangement with furniture always, and she took a while to settle. She wore her weather on the tip of her nose.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“Stories are the only things that give any meaning to our pointless, shapeless lives."

"Literature above all is a mode of transport. It lifts you up out of whatever situation you’re in and it puts you down somewhere else. It fucking escapes you. That’s what literature is."

-Jumping Off a Cliff: An Interview with Kevin Barry, the Paris Review. November 2013”
― Kevin Barry

“It was one of those summers you're nostalgic for before it even passes”
― Kevin Barry

“The motions of the alcohol are familiar: the easy warming, the calm sustain, and now the slow grading into remorse. A melancholy hour falleth. As afflicts a gentleman of colourful history. But, if he has nothing else to his name, he has his regrets, and these are not without value to the martyr’s self-portrait displayed in his mind’s eye. I am fifty-one years old, he thinks, and still at least halfways in love with meself. All told you’d have to call it a fucken achievement.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“Bad luck, bad luck – the idea entertained itself, fattened, came to fruition. They took cocaine in breakneck quantities against the idea of the bad luck. They were hammering into the Powers, the John Jameson, it was breakfast from the bottle and elevenses off the mirror.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier