A Long Long Way Quotes

“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

“I am cold, even though the heat of early summer is adequate. I am cold because I cannot find my heart.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way

“It had been a war of kingly poisons, in the air, in the memory, in the blood.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way

“She was altered by time and how he wished he was to be the man to comfort her in that and avow to her that no lessening of youth would bring a lessening of love”
― Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way

“He wondered suddenly and definitely for the first time in his life what words might be. Sounds and sense certainly, but something else also, a kind of natural music that explained a man’s heart or heartlessness, words as tempered as steel, as soft as air.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way

“He was shivering like a Wicklow sheepdog in a snowy yard, though the weather was officially 'clement'.

The first layer of clothing was his jacket, the second his shirt, the third his long-johns, the fourth his share of lice, the fifth his share of fear.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way

“When they came into their trench he felt small enough. The biggest thing there was the roaring of Death and the smallest thing was a man. Bombs not so far off distressed the earth of Belgium, disgorged great heaps of it, and did everything except kill him immediately, as he half expected them to do.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way

“I thought it would be a good thing to follow John Redmond’s words. I thought for my mother’s sake, her gentle soul, for the sake of my own children, I might go out and fight for to save Europe so that we might have the Home Rule in Ireland in the upshot. I came out to fight for a country that doesn’t exist, and now, Willie, mark my words, it never will.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way

“Heroic things had been suggested to them, and though they were not heroes as you might read about in old Greek stories, their hearts, such as they were, answered.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way