Barry Unsworth Quotes

“Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way”

— Barry Unsworth

“Money is sacred as everyone knows ... So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it. Once a man is in debt he becomes a flesh and blood form of money, a walking investment. You can do what you like with him, you can work him to death or you can sell him. This cannot be called cruelty or greed because we are seeking only to recover our investment and that is a sacred duty.”

— Barry Unsworth

“Love does not stand still, as everyone knows; it is always adding to its own shape whether by advance or retreat. Wounds can be absorbed, but only like elements embodied in a story; they are always there, part of the meaning.”

— Barry Unsworth

“A man may go through life and remain ignorant of himself he may think himself as other than he truly is and he may die with this illusion still intact because no circumstance of his life has obliged him to revise it.”

— Barry Unsworth

“Only way to live here is day by day, same as anywhere.”

— Barry Unsworth

“But what a man sees still must depend on what he looks for. While I have eyes of my own, I shall not need to borrow yours.”

— Barry Unsworth

“There are no stronger fetters than those we forge for ourselves.”

— Barry Unsworth

The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former ...

— Barry Unsworth

“The flood of cheap manufactures, for which the people have no need,destroys their industries. They become dependent on this trade and the demand for goods can only be met by enslaving their fellows.”

— Barry Unsworth

“Wickedness is too common in the world
for us to think much of why and wherefore.
It is more natural to ask about the rarer thing
and wonder why people sometimes do good.”

— Barry Unsworth

“The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever ...”

— Barry Unsworth

“Numbers of men are getting richer and greater numbers are getting poorer. Alas, both classes have higher expectations these days. In Short, sir, there has been a leap in bribes.”

— Barry Unsworth

“I was born for better things.”

— Barry Unsworth

“Doubt is the ally of hope, not its enemy, and together they made all the blessing he had.”

— Barry Unsworth

“The successful cannot be unhappy
it was a contradiction in terms.”

— Barry Unsworth

“I glimpsed the man's face with the shine of death on it. They laid him down there in the open. They had brought him there to be close to his death, I understood this also at the same moment. For who would wish to see a companion gasp his last on a jolting cart? We desire to keep the dying and the newly dead close before our eyes so as to give them full meed of pity. Our Lord was brought down to be pitied, on the Cross He was too far away.”

— Barry Unsworth

“This praise, though far from fulsome, gave me pleasure and that is to my shame. But there was something in him, some power of spirit, that made me want to please him. Perhaps, it occurs to me now, it was no more than the intensity of his wish. Men are distinguished by the power of their wanting. What this one wanted became his province and his meal, he governed it and fed on it from the first moment of desire. Besides, with the perversity of our nature, being tested had made me more desire to succeed, though knowing the enterprise to be sinful.”

— Barry Unsworth

“Grief works its own perversions and betrayals; the shape of what we have lost is as subject to corruption as the mortal body ...”

— Barry Unsworth

Sometimes in storm weather the shore had fluttered with disabled swallows. They crouched lower for his approach, without strength to escape. In his hands they pulsed with that same pulse. He had taken a bird and warmed it between his hands or inside his jacket, brought the life back until it was able to fly. Sometimes, released from his hands, they circled once around him before flying away; in gratitude, or so the child had believed
and the belief had survived all the man's science.

— Barry Unsworth

“At the same time he could hardly believe what he had been reading. It struck him as verging on madness. This wild confession, this owing to a crime so outlandish, so totally different from the true ones of mating and theft of the negroes, outraged him with its insolence and perversity. In the conflict of these feelings Erasmus was swept by doubt and loneliness. His whole being seemed under threat of dissolution. What became of law, of legitimacy, of established order, if a man could assume such attitudes of private morality, decide for himself where his fault lay? It turned everything upside down. He could think of nothing more damnable. And yet ... He remembered suddenly the second, rarer smile his cousin had, the one that came slowly, transforming his face. Briefly, unwillingly, Erasmus glimpsed the possibility of freedom.”

— Barry Unsworth

“I knew little of the world, as the Justice had seen, but I knew that we can lose ourselves in the parts we play and if this continues too long we will not find our way back again.”

— Barry Unsworth

It is everyone's bounden duty to try to get more than they have got already. If you have got two shillin' you try to make it into four shillin' ... there is no end to it.

— Barry Unsworth

“But that sacred hunger we spoke of justifies all.”

— Barry Unsworth

“The heart is a vital organ, but it is a faulty guide to conduct. It is the mind makes judgements and comparisons, furnishes evidence on which ideas of truth can be founded.”

— Barry Unsworth

Those confiding their pain cannot know at the outset how much they will be required to relive it.

— Barry Unsworth

“No latitude makes any difference to what men will do to other men, whether for gain or in the name of justice.”

— Barry Unsworth

“It is always through arbitrary combinations that experience enslaves the memory.”

— Barry Unsworth

“A little bit of kindness goes a long way with women.”

— Barry Unsworth

Wilson had been killed by everybody. It was this that made his death special, the children had been told. It was justice, it was all the people showing how much they hated this crime. Killing was justice when everybody joined in.

— Barry Unsworth

“When you in de right you heart strong you no 'fraid nottin'.”

— Barry Unsworth

Useful thing a warrant. Murder and theft change their names if you have one.

— Barry Unsworth

The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now than another aspect of that ancient urge - much older than the desire for truth - to command attention, dominate one's fellows.

— Barry Unsworth

“The odds against this were tremendous, but Edith was not interested in the odds; people who thought about odds were unheroic and would never achieve anything. 20”

— Barry Unsworth

“Justice is a mighty fine thing.”

— Barry Unsworth

“Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good ...”

— Barry Unsworth

Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising.

— Barry Unsworth

“Afterward I remembered these things very clearly, with that longing we feel sometimes to recover a state of life that we have lost for ever, though it is perhaps that we have lost it is all its value.”

— Barry Unsworth

“All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.”

— Barry Unsworth

“Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.”

— Barry Unsworth

“I like the condition of being an outsider, just passing through.”

— Barry Unsworth

“Angels are not complete, they need their counterparts, the dark needs the bright, the hidden needs the open, and vice versa. Sometimes they meet and recognise each other. Sometimes, as with Horatio and me, the pairing occurs over spaces of time and distance.”

— Barry Unsworth

“I spent most of the '60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey. These are countries where the ancient past is interfused with the daily present, and I remember being struck with wonder at the constant sense of continuity and connection, the reminders that lie in wait for you at every turn.”

— Barry Unsworth

“As I wrote I began to see more strongly that there were inescapable analogies. You couldn't really live through the '80s without feeling how crass and distasteful some of the economic doctrines were. The slave trade is a perfect model for that kind of total devotion to the profit motive without reckoning the human consequences.”

— Barry Unsworth

“We are quite at ease in this no man's land of ignorance and doubt and dispute, absorbed in the ambiguities of trying to reach truth by mixing fact with invention.”

— Barry Unsworth

“Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.”

— Barry Unsworth

“I'm unemployable in any other capacity.”

— Barry Unsworth

“In my generation, history was taught in terms of grand figures, men on whom the destiny of the nation hinged, quintessential heroes.”

— Barry Unsworth

“But whatever the ramifications, whatever turns the path takes, the beginning is always there, in a particular moment, a particular point of access.”

— Barry Unsworth

“I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.”

— Barry Unsworth