Sebastian Barry Quotes & Sayings

It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust. — Sebastian Barry

I hate writing, I hate pens and paper and all that fussiness. I have done well enough without it too, I think. Oh, I am lying to myself. I have feared writing. But books have saved me sometimes, that is the truth - my Samaritans. — Sebastian Barry

The years return us gradually to the afflictions and shames of childhood, it is a curiosity of existence. — Sebastian Barry

The executed men were cursed, and praised, and doubted, and despised, and held to account, and blackened, and wondered at, and mourned, all in a confusion complicated infinitely by the site of war. — Sebastian Barry

Our smiles mostly for each other, and every stranger a possible demon or bear, till they proved otherwise — Sebastian Barry

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

His first word, his first day at junior high. Nonsense things, the deepest, most important poetry of my life. — Sebastian Barry

I am cold, even though the heat of early summer is adequate. I am cold because I cannot find my heart. — Sebastian Barry

I haven't really written my plays and books - I've heard them. The stories are there already, singing in your genes and in your blood. — Sebastian Barry

How is that for some people drinking is a short-term loan on the spirit, but for others a heavy mortgage on the soul? — Sebastian Barry

That place where I was born was a cold town. Even the mountains stood away. They were not sure, no more than me, of that dark spot, those same mountains.
There was a black river that flowed through the town, and if it had no grace for mortal beings, it did for swans, and many swans resorted there, and even rode the river like some kind of plunging animal, in floods.
— Sebastian Barry

The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea. — Sebastian Barry

It was an earthquake, tearing at the sons of America, trying to swallow them up. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful sons, that women had reared, had kissed and screamed at, and that fathers had stared intently in their cots, to see themselves in the wondrous mirrors of their babies. — Sebastian Barry

It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark. — Sebastian Barry

The real comfort is that the history of the world contains so much grief that my small griefs are edged out, and are only cinders at the borders of the fire. I am saying this again because I want it to be true. — Sebastian Barry

In this makeshift place Willie Dunne discovered a peace of sorts. Yes the wild guns struck their great notes in the distance like the bells of a horrific city. Hearts asleep in the shires of England close upon the sea must heard them too. But he fell down between the boards of memory and sleep like a penny in an old floor. But he fell down between the boards of memory and sleep like a penny in an old floor. He lay there in the dust of nowhere, sunken and alone. — Sebastian Barry

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

And what else could we have come here for, except to sense these tiny victories? Not the big victories that crush and kill the victor. Not the wars and civil ructions, but the saving grace of a Hollandaise sauce that has escaped all the possibilities of culinary disaster and is being spread like a yellow prayer on a plump cod steak - victoriously. — Sebastian Barry

My own story, anyone's own story, is always told against me, even what I myself am writing here, because I have no heroic history to offer. There is no difficulty not of my own making. — Sebastian Barry

And whatever my life had been up to that day, it was another life after that. And that is the gospel truth. — Sebastian Barry

A child is never the author of his own history. — Sebastian Barry

The world is not full of betrayers, it is full of people with decent motives and a full desire to do right by those who know them and love them. This is a little-known truth, but I think it is a truth nonetheless. Empirically, from all the years of my work, I would attest to that. I know it is a miraculous conclusion, but there it is. We like to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer. — Sebastian Barry

They stood there two feet apart in all that vale of tears, one man asking another how he was, the other asking how the other was, the one not knowing truly what the world was, the other not knowing either. One nodded to the other now in an expression of understanding without understanding, of saying without breathing a word. And the other nodded back to the other, knowing nothing. Not this new world of terminality and astonishing dismay, of extremity of ruin and exaggeration of misery. — Sebastian Barry

I wonder if I were to have an X-ray at the little hospital, would the machine see my grief? Is it like rust, arheum about the heart? — Sebastian Barry

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

Order returns to his addled head, and God no longer breaks eggs there in the morning" from "The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty — Sebastian Barry

Well, all speaking is difficult, whether peril attends it or not. Sometimes peril to the body, sometimes a more intimate, miniature, invisible peril to the soul. When to speak at all is a betrayal of something, perhaps a something not even identified, hiding inside the chambers of the body like a scared refugee in a site of war. — Sebastian Barry

Grizzled old bastard like him don't go providing death-bed transformations. — Sebastian Barry

Indians look very puzzled, surprised and offended to be shot but they go to the wall with noble mien I must allow. You can't have nothing good in war without you punishing the guilty, the sergeant says with a savage air and no one says nothing against that. John Cole whispers to me that most times that sergeant he just wrong but just now and then he's right and he's right this time. I guess I'm thinking this is true. We get drunk then and the sergeant is clutching his belly all evening and then everything is blotted out till you awake in the bright early morning needing a piss and then it all floods back into your brain what happened and it makes your heart yelp like a dog. — Sebastian Barry

The trust of those in dark need is forgiving work. — Sebastian Barry

Those that we love, those essential beings, are removed from us at the will of the Almighty, or the devils that usurp them. — Sebastian Barry

The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone, we must be elaborating, improving, poeticising. — Sebastian Barry

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

We may be immune to typhoid, tetanus, chicken-pox, diphtheria, but never memory. There is no inoculation against that. — Sebastian Barry

A Ford motorcar is a magical thing in the night with the spraying lamps against the pitch road and the smell of metal and perfume under the clothy roof. — Sebastian Barry

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

Clinton and his cigar was so much greater a man than Bush and his rifle. — Sebastian Barry

They had a house there below Kelsha, one of the old mud-walled jobs, that has long disappeared back into its garden of fuchsia and orange lilies that the mother herself had planted in her first days of marriage, as women do in their gardens, all full of hope. — Sebastian Barry

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

History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man's dominion of the earth. — Sebastian Barry

I guess love laughs at history a little. — Sebastian Barry

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

my mother's wits were now in an attic of her head which had neither door nor stair, or at least none that I could find. — Sebastian Barry

A man's memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can't do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards. — Sebastian Barry

Book I still possess in all the flotsam and ruckus of my life, — Sebastian Barry

Roseanne, Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self, would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me? — Sebastian Barry

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

SPRING COMES INTO Massachusetts with her famous flame. God's breath warming the winter out of things — Sebastian Barry

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

Four men killed that day. The phrase sat up in Willie's head like a rat and made a nest for itself there — Sebastian Barry

I am as late as the rabbit in Lewis Carroll. — Sebastian Barry

Names, names, all passed away, forgotten, mere birdsong in the bushes of things. — Sebastian Barry

To the extend that a man with the soul filleted out of him could be happy. Since the things he had wished for were no more, he wished for nothing. He breathed in and out. That was all. — Sebastian Barry

THERE'S OLD SORROW in your blood like second nature and new sorrow that maddens the halls of sense. Causes — Sebastian Barry

It had been a war of kingly poisons, in the air, in the memory, in the blood. — Sebastian Barry

A saying, since a saying arises always from the mouths of adults when a person was just a listening child, was supposed to carry you back there, like a magic trick or a scrap of a story, or something with something else still sticking to it. — Sebastian Barry

He was looking into that strange place, the middle distance, the most mysterious, human, and rich of all distances. And from his eyes came slowly tears, immaculate human tears, before the world touches them. River, window and eyes. — Sebastian Barry

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

There are moments when I am pierced through by an inexplicable joy, as if, in having nothing, I have the world. — Sebastian Barry

Fred Astaire. Not a handsome man. He said himself he couldn't sing. He was balding his whole life. He danced like a cheetah runs, with the grace of the first creation. I mean, that first week. On one of those days God created Fred Astaire. Saturday maybe, since that was the day for the pictures. When you saw Fred you felt better about everything. He was a cure. He was bottled in the films and all around the earth, from Castlebar to Cairo, he healed the halt and the blind. That's the gospel truth. St Fred. Fred the Redeemer. — Sebastian Barry

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

Trench dirt didn't always wash out, I am sure. — Sebastian Barry

Something had happened to that sorrow. It had gone rancid in him, he thought; it had boiled down to something he didn't understand. The pith of sorrow was in the upshot a little seed of death. — Sebastian Barry

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

We were two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world. — Sebastian Barry

There is seldom a difficulty with religion where there is friendship. — Sebastian Barry

I thought if I was going to live a life in this land I was accidentally born on, I must people it; I must have a history ... I'm looking for these people inside me, wherever they may be; that is my form of research. — Sebastian Barry

It is always worth itemizing happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers of happiness while you can. — Sebastian Barry

He carried a highly ecclesiastical umbrella, like something real and austere, that said its prayers at night in the hatstand. I — Sebastian Barry

three living men had seen horrors, and those who see horrors may do horrors just as bad, that is the law of life and war. Soon — Sebastian Barry

to speak to anyone on her way, and by no means to speak to any Free State soldier, for if she does, we will be killed here. They will kill us as easily as they killed Willie on the mountain, that's for sure. I would say to you, we will kill you if she speaks, but I am not sure if we would.' My father looked at him surprised. And it seemed so honest and polite a thing to say, I resolved to do as he asked, and speak to no one. 'And anyhow, we have no bullets, which is why we stayed in the heather, like hares, and didn't stir. I would we had stirred, lads,' said the brother of the dead man, 'and risen up, and thrun ourselves at them, because this is no way to stand in the world, with Willie dead, and us living.' And — Sebastian Barry

It is worthless talking about what we have been spared by death. Death grins at that I am sure. Death of all creation knows the value of life. — Sebastian Barry

I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old, the first pattern in them, and cherish them for that. — Sebastian Barry

I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made up 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

But I suspect the reported number of good novels this year is a result of 9/11 and all the other alarums of recent years. I think it set a certain gear into movement, unseen, silent, at the heart of many writers. Writers with children, writers with that hope of a peaceful century; a sort of literary battle stations. I was not surprised to hear Ali Smith describe her wonderful book The Accidental as a war book.
Sebastian Barry, in interview with TMO (2005) — Sebastian Barry

There's no soldier don't have a queer little spot in his wretched heart for his enemy, that's just a fact. — Sebastian Barry

Tears have a better character cried alone. Pity can sometimes be more wolf than dog. — Sebastian Barry

Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy. — Sebastian Barry

We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach. — Sebastian Barry

But Fr Gaunt was so clipped and trim he had no antennae at all for grief. He was like a singer who knows the words and can sing, but cannot sing the song as conceived in the heart of the composer. Mostly he was dry. He spoke over young and old with the same dry music. But — Sebastian Barry

Other times you had a rake of our lads killed, and a rake of the old grey-suited devils, and you wouldn't know who had won the fucking thing, sure how could you tell boys? — Sebastian Barry

In those strange days when if anything unexpected could happen it probably would. — Sebastian Barry

Memory, I must suppose, if it is neglected becomes like a box room, or a lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not only from neglect but also from too much haphazard searching in them, and things to boot thrown in that don't belong there. — Sebastian Barry

If it had been a great necessity, if it had been contingents of an army meeting to overwhelm the enemy by stealth, it might not have worked out so neatly. But fate it would seem is a perfect strategist and will work miracles of timing to assist our destruction. — Sebastian Barry

What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking? — Sebastian Barry

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

Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now. — Sebastian Barry

Her greatest wish I should think was that I would remain exactly as I was, and how I regret that that was not to be. It was only for her roses that she wished for change, the strange moment of loral enchantment when the branch of a rose mutates, and shows a "sport," something new arising from the known rose. A leap in beauty. — Sebastian Barry

There are some sufferings that we seem as a creature to forget, or we would never survive as a creature among all the other creatures. — Sebastian Barry

I miss her face, its beauty, and its beauty lost. — Sebastian Barry

That is because at the close of the day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body. — Sebastian Barry

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

Because faithfulness is not a human question, but a divine one. — Sebastian Barry

A beard on a man is only a way of hiding something, his face of course, but also the inner matters, like a hedge around a secret garden, or a cover over a bird cage. — Sebastian Barry

The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see. — Sebastian Barry

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

For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth. History — Sebastian Barry

Things that give you heart are rare enough, better note them in your head when you find them and not forget. — Sebastian Barry

I was well aware how famously or infamously secretive these old institutions can be, no more than ourselves, a mixture of worry, lost power, perhaps even concern. That the truth may not always be desirable, that one thing leads to another thing, that facts not only lead forward to resolution, but backwards into the shadows, and sometimes into the various little hells we make for each other. — Sebastian Barry

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