159 Quotes by Sebastian Barry

To remember sometimes is a great sorrow, but when the remembering has been done, there comes afterwards a very curious peacefulness. Because you have planted your flag on the summit of the sorrow. You have climbed it.

We are not lovers rushing to embrace but there is a sense of terrifying union none the less, as if courage yearns to join with courage.

Gods work! Silence so great it hurts your ears, colour so bright it hurts your staring eyes. A vicious ruined class of man could cry at such scenes because it seems to tell him that his life is not approved. The remnant of innocence burns in his breast like a ember of the very sun.

We were two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world.

We may be immune to typhoid, tetanus, chicken-pox, diphtheria, but never memory. There is no inoculation against that.

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

The devil, I am beginning to suspect, and great grief it is causing me, has a greater sense of justice than the other man.

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.

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.