Top 50 Kevin Barry Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It’s freedom, she says. It’s poverty, Charlie says. Poverty is always for free.”

— Kevin Barry

2. “It is nothing, to give one’s life for Ireland. I’m not the first and maybe I won’t be the last. What’s my life compared with the cause?”

— Kevin Barry

3. “Mouth of teeth on him like a vandalised graveyard but we all have our crosses.”

— Kevin Barry

4. “It was Dominick Gleeson, aka Big Dom, editor of the city’s only newspaper, the Bohane Vindicator. Of course, it was in no small part thanks to Logan Hartnett that the Vindicator remained the city’s only newspaper. Its masthead solgan: ‘Truth or Vengeance’, as inked above a motif of two quarrelling ravens.”

— Kevin Barry

5. “There is a stab of awareness at the beginning and at the end of love, and the feeling precisely replicates – it’s a twinge of cold certainty at either end of the affair, and it is twice terrifying.”

— Kevin Barry

6. “Watch for the glamorous sentence that appears from nowhere – it might have plans for you. Watch out for the clauses that are elegantly strung, for the string of words bejewelled. Watch out for the ripe language-it means your words may be about to go off?”

— Kevin Barry

7. “My husband is like one of those second-hand books you buy that’s got all the wrong bits underlined.”

— Kevin Barry

8. “Would you say there’s any end in sight, Charlie?”

— Kevin Barry

9. “It was peopled day and night by cirrhotic-looking old crooks and wastrel youths with insane mouths.”

— Kevin Barry

10. “Before forty, you think that exhaustion is something like a long-lasting hangover. But at forty you learn all about it. Even your passions exhaust you.”

— Kevin Barry

11. “We come into the world on the tip of a scream and the wave of our poor mothers’ roaring.”

— Kevin Barry

12. “Tricky the paths a long love might follow, like the spiral down twists of a raindrop on a windowpane.”

— Kevin Barry

13. “The motions of the alcohol are familiar: the easy warming, the calm sustain, and now the slow grading into remorse. A melancholy hour falleth. As afflicts a gentleman of colourful history. But, if he has nothing else to his name, he has his regrets, and these are not without value to the martyr’s self-portrait displayed in his mind’s eye. I am fifty-one years old, he thinks, and still at least halfways in love with meself. All told you’d have to call it a fucken achievement.”

— Kevin Barry

14. “He was a country boy with his wires twisted all wrong. He should have never been let near a city.”

— Kevin Barry

15. “And now from the vantage of his years a terrible swoon comes down on him; Cynthia, for a moment, descends all the way through him. This is not a rare occurrence. He will never lose the feeling of the love that they had together, or the nausea of its absence. Hate is not the answer to love; death is its answer.”

— Kevin Barry

16. “It was one of those summers you’re nostalgic for before it even passes.”

— Kevin Barry

17. “He was more than possessed by his crimes and excesses – he was the gaunt accumulation of them.”

— Kevin Barry

18. “The Irishmen look out blithely at the faces that pass by in a blur of the seven distractions – love, grief, pain, sentimentality, avarice, lust, want-of-death.”

— Kevin Barry

19. “But now he came up to himself slowly again – it was like rising through heavy water – and he was warmed by one of the great consolations: nothing very terrible lasts for very long.”

— Kevin Barry

20. “It’s about what you’ve got to put yourself through to make anything worthwhile. It’s about going to the dark places and using what you find there.”

— Kevin Barry

21. “Fathers throw the longer shadows. We get over the mothers, at last, but hardly ever the fathers, she said.”

— Kevin Barry

22. “The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths.”

— Kevin Barry

23. “The men are elegiacal, woeful, heavy in the bones.”

— Kevin Barry

24. “There was a papery film like mothskin stretched over his eyes. He slithered about making goldfish gasps as though traumatised by an otherworld invisible but to his eyes. He wore a corduroy suit in a marmalade shade. He was a cattish sort and slow-gesturing.”

— Kevin Barry

25. “Never name the moment for happiness or it will pass by.”

— Kevin Barry

26. “She sensed older presences as she walked. She knew by a cold stirring that here they had made their fires, and here their cattle had grazed, and here they ate periwinkles and oysters from the shell, and they had this burning salt on their lips, and felt this old rain, and made their cries of love and war, and roamed in hordes; their little kingdoms here were settled, and disassembled; by night, in our valley, the wolves had bayed.”

— Kevin Barry

27. “Cause of Death: the west of Ireland.”

— Kevin Barry

28. “Bad luck, bad luck – the idea entertained itself, fattened, came to fruition. They took cocaine in breakneck quantities against the idea of the bad luck. They were hammering into the Powers, the John Jameson, it was breakfast from the bottle and elevenses off the mirror.”

— Kevin Barry

29. “In the native way he was tormented now by his own happiness.”

— Kevin Barry

30. “He sits in his tomb up top of the Newport hotel. It contains a crunchy armchair, a floppy bed, several arrogant spiders, a mattress with stains the shapes of planets and an existential crisis. But he wouldn’t want to sound too French about it.”

— Kevin Barry

31. “He stops up – he’s had a stunning thought. Is there such a thing, he wants to know, as a positive crack-up? Where the mind breaks down and re-forms again but only to show the world more clearly than before. A mind left calm as a settled pool.”

— Kevin Barry

32. “A troubled silence descends – the old times are shifting again; they are rearranging like fault lines. The past will not relent.”

— Kevin Barry

33. “There comes a time when you just have to live among your ghosts. You keep the conversation going. Elsewise the broad field of the future opens out as nothing but a vast emptiness.”

— Kevin Barry

34. “She gathered into a bundle of herself, drew up her legs – Dilly had a complicated arrangement with furniture always, and she took a while to settle. She wore her weather on the tip of her nose.”

— Kevin Barry

35. “The days were cold as evil but the evenings spread magic from the sea inwards and stretched out and tapped the place until it was open to our dreaming.”

— Kevin Barry

36. “The Past is uncertain, mobile. It shifts and rearranges back there yet.”

— Kevin Barry

37. “He knew more about the hills than he knew about himself, but lush, yes, as if it was May, a savage growth that made each small copse of trees livid with bunched ferocity.”

— Kevin Barry

38. “The port by night had a hot, diabolic quality. It rang of the past but was of the new century. On such a clear night you could see an hour south to the lamps of Tangier.”

— Kevin Barry

39. “The men sit restlessly on the bench. They are at a high vantage atop the stack of their years. They are old enough for the long view in either direction now.”

— Kevin Barry

40. “Now breathe, and step out again, a step further from the past. Step into the streets as narrow as bones, the white streets of the labyrinth, and breathe deeply. Breathe, and step out once more.”

— Kevin Barry

41. “Charlie Redmond? This man here? The only man I ever.”

— Kevin Barry

42. “Para korku getirir.”

— Kevin Barry

43. “They settled into it together. They arranged the laptop on a chair between the two beds and she sat back on the edge of Maurice’s and they watched Rumble Fish again. In my humble and honest? Maurice said. We could be looking at Francis Ford Coppola’s finest hour.”

— Kevin Barry

44. “They are old enough for the long view in either direction now.”

— Kevin Barry

45. “The past shifted and rearranged itself. He could not step out from its reach. The past was fluid in the moment.”

— Kevin Barry

46. “Even as a kid, in the stroller, he was tuned to odd frequencies, it seemed.”

— Kevin Barry

47. “Out here, it was as if the world had backed off from them for a spell. They believed in fatedness and and meant-to-be’s. They believed in the dark star that was theirs to steer by.”

— Kevin Barry

48. “The past is uncertain, mobile. It shifts and rearranges back there. All might turn and change back there yet.”

— Kevin Barry

49. “You know what I get to wondering, Maurice? Tell me, Charlie. About death, Moss. Here we go. Is it as raw a deal as they make it out to be? Come again?”

— Kevin Barry

50. “It’s poverty, Charlie says. Poverty is always for free.”

— Kevin Barry