Mari Cmc > Mari's Quotes

“To remember sometimes is a great sorrow, but when the remembering has been done, there comes afterwards a very curious peacefulness. Because you have planted your flag on the summit of the sorrow. You have climbed it.
And I notice again in the writing of this confession that there is nothing called long-ago after all. When things are summoned up, it is all present time, pure and simple. So that, much to my surprise, people I have loved are allowed to live again. What it is that allows them I don’t know. I have been happy now and then in the last two weeks, the special happiness that is offered from the hand of sorrow.”
― Sebastian Barry

“Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“I had made a decision, although I hardly knew it yet. It's often that way with decisions, they're made in some hidden part of us and the awareness secretes itself slowly into that conscious part of us that imagines it decides.”
― Neil Jordan, Mistaken

“I hoped that grief was similar to the other emotions. That it would end, the way happiness did. Or laughter.”
― Neil Jordan

“I walked with them, as crowds have that effect on me, I want to do what they do, to journey towards some point of revelation, which of course never comes”
― Neil Jordan, Mistaken

“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

“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, On Canaan's Side

“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, On Canaan's Side

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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, The Secret Scripture

“We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Our smiles mostly for each other, and every stranger a possible demon or bear, till they proved otherwise”
― Sebastian Barry, On Canaan's Side

“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, The Secret Scripture

“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, 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