Sebastian Barry Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

— 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

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

— Sebastian Barry

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

— 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

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

— 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 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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“But as I spoke to him, all I could feel was love. That was ridiculous. And I am deeply, deeply suspicious of it.”

— 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

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

“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

“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

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

— Sebastian Barry

“Our smiles mostly for each other, and every stranger a possible demon or bear, till they proved otherwise”

— Sebastian Barry

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

— 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

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

“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

“The trust of those in dark need is forgiving work.”

— 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

“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

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

“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

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

“I miss her face, its beauty, and its beauty lost.”

— 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

“I am as late as the rabbit in Lewis Carroll.”

— 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

“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

“Names, names, all passed away, forgotten, mere birdsong in the bushes of things.”

— 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

“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

“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 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

“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

“He loved telling stories. He had been everywhere in the world. The northwest frontier, the landscape of the Hindu Kush, was one of the great landscapes of my childhood because he used to evoke it with his stories. He taught me the sequence of ranks in the British army when I was about eight. I was in the bed with him while he told me everything about his life - except, probably, the real things, because of course you couldn't go there.”

— Sebastian Barry