Sebastian Barry Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

There is seldom a difficulty with religion where there is friendship.

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

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

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

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

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

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”.

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

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 dwelling on things I love, even if a measure of tragedy is stitched into everything, if you follow the thread long enough

Men so sick they are dying of death.

Everything bad gets shot at in America, says John Cole, and everything good too.

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

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.

with ringworm, lice bites, and a million bugs. Men so sick they are dying

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?

The trust of those in dark need is forgiving work.

But I had no idea what I looked like. Children may feel epic and large to theyselves and yet be only scraps to view.

A child is never the author of his own history.

I guess love laughs at history a little.

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?

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

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

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.

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.