159 Quotes by Sebastian Barry

Out there in the silent prairie with only the perpetual wind for music and he tells us to charge. Ain’t there an old story about a windmill?

They say we are creatures raised by God above the animals but any man that has lived knows that’s damned lies.

No one says too much and what is said is only light-hearted and bantering because we want to preserve our advantage over fear. Fear like a bear in the cave of banter. We’re.

I cannot hardly speak to myself let alone to him. I feel the world is against me and at the same time I feel miserably at odds with everything. I have the awkward sense that if I open my mouth people will know me for the villain I am. At the same time, or in the next breath, tears keep surging up into my eyes, tears of some righteousness, because my mind keeps rising to righteousness. All in all I am like a ragged wind in a tangled hedge.

Morality has its own civil wars, with its own victims in its own time and place.

We may be black-hearted men when our turn comes but there is a seam in men called justice that nothing burns off complete. Caught-His-Horse-First.

The music of birds. I guess everything comes from that, the dances of simple country folk, the old songs that both cure and trouble the hearts of listeners.

The mind is a wild liar and I don’t trust much in it that I find there.

To be alone, but to be pierced through with a kingly joy, now and then, as I believe I am, is a great possession indeed.