Old God's Time Quotes

“People endured horrors, and then they couldn’t talk about them. The real stories of the world were bedded in silence.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“No one minds life as long as they are not trying to leave it. Nor death, as long as they are not dying.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“It was not just because he was old, and looked old to them, but because he was a pensioned ghost from the strange past, a pointless survivor, an old soldier of forgotten wars. A remnant, with a torn gansey for a soul.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“The burden of getting older was borne alone,”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“He liked it for its modesty among the bigger efforts. Like a human soul should be in the world, among elephants, galaxies.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“To him this was the whole point of retirement, of existence – to be stationary, happy and useless.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“Not so many years ago the parish priest would not have let her be buried in hallowed ground. Not any fucking more. No fucking priests allowed instead.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“The Irish people. Poor stragglers stuck on the edge of Europe. Took a wrong turn on some ancient landscape. Could go no further and could not go back.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“The burden of getting older was borne alone, but also as if by someone else, because he often couldn’t recognise bits of himself he caught in the mirror.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“in human affairs everything is hastiness and farewell.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“A matter of belief, the first day of spring, like Protestants and Catholics differing over the mother of God.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“It would all go on, for ever, the little glories of life.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“Some men make flower beds, and some men kill.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“just a schoolboy still but astute in the ways of sorrow.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“The epic woman. Who had survived everything except survival.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“Kol Nidrei,”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“These strange wars at the end of the long tale of Empire.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“Perhaps he was to be delivered up now to death. It certainly felt like a strong weakness”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“they sheltered under a stone arch of unknown purpose, maybe an entrance into somewhere that was no longer there.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“Even alive she was every so often like someone you remembered that you had loved.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“It was never a night to be a tramp in Ireland.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“Did they know how privileged they were to be young? No need. And no one ever knows that, at the time.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“Vague torment was his forte, he thought.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“As if the Irish weather were his adversary. Which it was, in its way, the Irish weather, which would so rarely play ball with the plans of citizens. All public holidays were guaranteed to be rainswept, stem to stern. It was a given of Irish life. A trip to the beach, begun in blazing sunshine, would inevitably end in shivering tears, in sudden storms, in lids of cloud. How often the Irish person, of whatever age or sex, had lain on his or her towel, on any beach in Ireland, body stiffening with the assault of the cold, waiting for the cloud cover to pass away, and the gladsome sun to pour down again. Soon the shivering passes to convulsions, to an epilepsy of exposure. The victim quails, squints up at the sky with one eye, because there is a glare even in the cloud, trying to make a judgement. Should I stay or should I go? Is there any point in lying here, as gradually death seems a desirable thing?”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“These strange wars at the end of the long tale of Empire. Putting things right, putting things in their right places, before leaving for ever. Mopping up operations. Every problem in the country caused by your own army in the long-ago.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“The burden of getting older was borne alone, but also as if by someone else, because he often couldn’t recognise bits of himself he caught in the mirror. Whose newly scrawny legs were those? Why was his head sitting further forward on his neck? Was it really kind of the gods to do this to the skin of his face, as if a child had been let loose with a brown marker?”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“the”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“Per ell aquest era el sentit de la jubilació, de l'existència: estar-se immòbil, feliç i inútil”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“Per ell aquest era el sentit de la jubilació, de l'existència: estar-de immòbil, feliç i inútil”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“manifest. If he had always in his life felt like the youngest soul in the room, no matter what his age, now he felt the oldest.”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time