A Thousand Moons Quotes

“The music of birds. I guess everything comes from that, the dances of simple country folk, the old songs that both cure and trouble the hearts of listeners.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“I could feel myself melting away. I thought I was like water but I had no cup to hold me.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“my mother had shown me how to shuck off fear and have the courage of a thousand moons.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“You only had to look like you done something wrong in America and they would hang you, if you were poor.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“We were nothing to them. I think now of the great value we put on what we were and I wonder what does it mean when another people judge you to be worth so little you were only to be killed? How our pride in everything was crushed so small it disappeared until it was just specks of things floating away on the wind.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“It had more darkness in it than any daylight could unpick.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“John Cole, the keel of my boat. Thomas the oars and the sails.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“Work like that drives nearly every other thought away and there was the usual strange solace of numbers in spite of all.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“Lige Magan’s motto was, two glasses heaven, three glasses hell.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“It was all the one. Where John Cole abided, there was to be found Thomas with his simple heart. Their love was the first commandment of my world - Thou shalt hope to love like them. We have all to meet many souls and hearts along the way - we are obliged to - we must pray we can encounter one or two Thomases and John Coles on that journey. Then we can say life was worth the living and love was worth the gamble.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“guess I had no choice in the matter. Once your mother is taken from you you can’t ever catch up with her again. You can’t cry out ‘Wait for me’ when the winds turn cold under a wolf moon and she has walked far ahead of you across the grasses searching for wood.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“Else what was happening was, I was going to be beaten up every time I was in town. It was English kept me from that. Some straggly farmhand might look at you and see the dark skin and the black hair and think that gave him a right to knock you down and kick you. No one saying boo to him for that. No sheriff or deputy neither.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“Whitemen in the main just see slaves and Indians. They don’t see the single souls. How all are emperors to those that love them.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Life, Liberty.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“What the deer feels in the second she sees the hunter with his gun I seemed to feel for long stretches of hours and days. I was poised for flight like any creature might be but where I was to flee I didn’t know.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“You have to try to shore up the levee when the flood races down. Even with your bare hands.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“She was trying to wash the violence off of him.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“A human person finds a little medicine in another’s sadness. So I found. But it’s not so strange because the world is mysterious anyhow.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“In there, she said, humanity was a book without a cover.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“But we only have one path across the mire of remembrance in general.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“Trouble always comes and no use wishing it didn’t. Thing is, to get through it – and out the other side. If there is another side.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“You have got to remember how dangerous the world is and that here is a mighty patch of danger and you have got to live through it.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“Then his face opened again like that spot in the woods touched suddenly by stray sunlight.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“Sometimes we are so foolish in our thoughts that even fools would baulk at what we are thinking.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“No kindness and no cruelty in white-eye America was ever done without a piece of paper somewhere tipped in. Even an Indian girl like me bobbed up to look like a clean-faced boy knew that. All my people had been killed clean to the letter of the law, I did not doubt. Not our law, but our law was just words on the wind.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“He smiled at me with his barn-wide smile. I knew he didn’t think I was a cur of an Indian, not at all. He knew what I was.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“It wasn’t a crime to beat an Indian, not at all.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons

“If you can own nothing, he owned it.”
― Sebastian Barry, A Thousand Moons