Michael

“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

“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

“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

“The Irishmen look out blithely at the faces that pass by in a blur of the seven distractions—love, grief, pain, sentimentality, avarice, lust, want-of-death.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier