159 Quotes by 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

What can I tell you further? I once lived among humankind, and found them in their generality to be cruel and cold, and yet could mention the names of three or four that were like angels.I suppose we measure the importance of our days by those few angels we spy among us, and yet aren't like them.

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

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.

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