159 Quotes by Sebastian Barry

I was so affected by hearing another human speak to me with grace and respect.

There is a moment in the history of every beaten child when his mind parts with hopes of dignity – pushes off hope like a boat without a rower, and lets it go as it will on the stream, and resigns himself to the tally stick of pain.

So it was with the world, restless, kind of brutal. Always going on.

He was looking into that strange place, the middle distance, the most mysterious, human, and rich of all distances.

We’re holding hands then like lovers who have just met or how we imagine lovers might be in the unknown realm where lovers act as lovers without concealment.

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 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.

Like many a man in authority, he was sublimely happy as long as he was presenting his ideas, and as long as his ideas were meeting with agreement.

The knives opened the flesh like they were painting paintings of a new country, sheer plains of dark land, with the red rivers bursting their banks everywhere, till we were sloshing in God knows what and the dry earth was suddenly turned to noisy mud. The Shawnees ate the lights raw. Their mouths were sinkholes of dark blood.