Best 73 quotes of Sebastian Barry on MyQuotes

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.

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

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.

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 s 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

A child is never the author of his own history.

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

A memory so clear, so wonderful, so beyond the bounds of possibility. I know it. My head is as clear as a glass.

And of course I started to cry. Not for myself strangely enough, though I am sure I could have, with capital and interest, but no, not for myself. For my mother? Who can really itemise the cause of our human tears?

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.

A savage sense entered me, of being of such small account in the world that I wasn't to be helped, that priest and woman and man had put out an edict that I wasn't to be helped, I was to be left to the elements, just as I was, a walking animal, forsaken. Maybe it was then that some part of me leapt away from myself, something fled from my brain, I don't know.

Because I thought it was still possible everything was all right. Why did I think that? Because I had not heard otherwise. I was in the middle of a mystery.

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

Do you know the grief of it? I hope not. The grief that does not age, that does not go away with time, like most griefs and human matters. That is the grief that is always there, swinging a little in a derelict house, my father, my father. I cry out for him.

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

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

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.

He wondered suddenly and definitely for the first time in his life what words might be. Sounds and sense certainly, but something else also, a kind of natural music that explained a man’s heart or heartlessness, words as tempered as steel, as soft as air.

How difficult it is to live.

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

How I would like to say that I loved my father so much that I could not have lived without him, but such an avowal would be proved false in time. Those that we love, those essential beings, are removed from us at the will of the Almighty, or the devils that usurp him. It is as if a huge lump of lead were lain over the soul, such deaths, and where that soul was previously weightless, now is a secret and ruinous burden at the very heart of us.

Hunger takes away what you are. Everything we were was just nothing then.

I am content to say that caught as I was, without rescuers as I was in that moment, there was a fierce, dark fury moving through me, wave upon wave, like the sea itself, that was bizarrely a comfort. My face maybe showing only a shadow of it, as faces will . . . Rage, dark rage, lightened by nothing.

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

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

I am easy as a woman, taut as a man. All my limbs is broke as a man, and fixed good as a woman. I lie down with the soul of woman and wake with the same. I don't foresee no time where this ain't true no more.

I did not intend to cry out, but as you will see these small actions, associated in most people's minds with the ease and happiness of life, are to me still like knives in my heart to think of.

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.

I guess love laughs at history a little.

I had no desire to be seen by anyone, or talk to anyone. Sometimes out walking I would be in such a peculiar state of mind that I would rush home at the merest hint of another person.

I knew, I knew any proper, decent life was over. The word of a man like that was like a death sentence . . . I had known it all along, but it is a very different matter to know your sentence, and then to hear it spoken by your judge . . . Truest of all things, there was no one to help me, no one to stand at my side.

I know she absolutely delights in the improvement of the weather, in the turning of the year.

I must admit there are 'memories' in my head that are curious even to me.

I seen the cold deeds of hunger. The world got a lot of people in it, and when it comes to slaughter and famine, whether we're to live or die, it don't care much either way. The world got so many it don't need to. We could have starved out there on the badlands, on that desert that wasn't a desert, on that journey that wasn't a journey so much as a fleeing eastward. Thousands die everywhere always. The world don't care much, it just don't mind much. That's what I notice about it. There is that great wailing and distress and then the pacifying waters close over everything, old Father Time washes his hands. On he plods to the next place. It suits us well to know these things, that you may exert yourself to survive. Just surviving is the victory.

I smiled at him my oldest old-woman smile, as if I did not quite understand.