159 Quotes by Sebastian Barry

There are moments when I am pierced through by an inexplicable joy, as if, in having nothing, I have the world.

So then it got hotter. You can feel your back begin to cook. Pinch of salt and a few sprigs of rosemary and you got a dinner. God Almighty, the heat.

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.

To the extend that a man with the soul filleted out of him could be happy. Since the things he had wished for were no more, he wished for nothing. He breathed in and out. That was all.

A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands.

We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.

You only had to look like you done something wrong in America and they would hang you, if you were poor.

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

Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now.