Quotes by 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?

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

It’s a dark thing when the world sets no value on you and your kin, and then Death comes stalking in, in his bloody boots”.

This (white settlers) was the section of humanity that was favored in that place, the Indians had no place no more there. Their tickets of passage were rescinded and the bailiffs of God took back the papers of their soles.

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.”

“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.”

“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.”