Sebastian Barry > Quotes

“Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“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, The Secret Scripture

“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, Days Without End

“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, The Secret Scripture

“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, The Secret Scripture

“We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

“Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End: AN IRISH TIMES BEST IRISH BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY

“And all those boys of Europe born in those times, and thereabouts those times, Russian, French, Belgian, Serbian, Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, Italian, Prussian, German, Austrian, Turkish – and Canadian, Australian, American, Zulu, Gurkha, Cossack, and all the rest – their fate was written in a ferocious chapter in the book of life, certainly. Those millions of mothers and their million gallons of mother’s milk, millions of instances of small talk and baby talk, beatings and kisses, ganseys and shoes, piled up in history in great ruined heaps, with a loud and broken music, human stories told for nothing, for ashes, for death’s amusement, flung on the mighty scrapheap of souls, all those million boys in all their humours to be milled by the millstones of a coming war.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way

“For myself, hand on heart, those things never bothered me. It is one of the graces of married life that for some magical reason we always look the same to each other. Even our friends never seem to grow old. What a boon that is, and never suspected by me when I was young. But I suppose, otherwise, what would we do? There has never been a person in an old people’s home that hasn’t looked around dubiously at the other inhabitants. They are the old ones, they are the club that no one wants to join. But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“I guess love laughs at history a little.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

“That is because at the close of the day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Then rain began to fall in an extravagant tantrum. High up in mountain country though we were, every little river became a huge muscled snake, and the water wanted to find out everything,”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End: AN IRISH TIMES BEST IRISH BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY

“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, The Secret Scripture

“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, On Canaan's Side

“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 Secret Scripture

“Things that give you heart are rare enough, better note them in your head when you find them and not forget.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

“Because faithfulness is not a human question, but a divine one.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Spring comes into Massachusetts with her famous flame. God’s breath warming the winter out of things”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

“It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“The world is not full of betrayers, it is full of people with decent motives and a full desire to do right by those who know them and love them. This is a little-known truth, but I think it is a truth nonetheless. Empirically, from all the years of my work, I would attest to that. I know it is a miraculous conclusion, but there it is. We like to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“The terror and hurt in my story happened because when I was young I thought others were the authors of my fortune or misfortune; I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made 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, The Secret Scripture

“Everything bad gets shot at in America, says John Cole, and everything good too.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

“What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking?”
― Sebastian Barry, On Canaan's Side

“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, The Secret Scripture

“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, The Secret Scripture

“...we are never old to ourselves. That is because at the close of the day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“There is seldom a difficulty with religion where there is friendship.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Empurpled rapturous hills I guess and the long day brushstroke by brushstroke enfeebling into darkness and then the fires blooming on the pitch plains. In the beautiful blue night there was plenty of visiting and the braves was proud and ready to offer a lonesome soldier a squaw for the duration of his passion. John Cole and me sought out a hollow away from prying eyes. Then with the ease of men who have rid themselves of worry we strolled among the Indian tents and heard the sleeping babies breathing and spied out the wondrous kind called by the Indians winkte or by white men berdache, braves dressed in the finery of squaws. John Cole gazes on them but he don’t like to let his eyes linger too long in case he gives offence. But he’s like the plough-horse that got the whins. All woken in a way I don’t see before. The berdache puts on men’s garb when he goes to war, this I know. Then war over it’s back to the bright dress. We move on and he’s just shaking like a cold child. Two soldiers walking under the bright nails of the stars. John Cole’s long face, long stride. The moonlight not able to flatter him because he was already beautiful.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End: AN IRISH TIMES BEST IRISH BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY

“They say we are creatures raised by God above the animals but any man that has lived knows that’s damned lies.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End: AN IRISH TIMES BEST IRISH BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY

“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, The Secret Scripture