Top 120 Sebastian Barry Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Tears have a better character cried alone. Pity can sometimes be more wolf than dog.”

— Sebastian Barry

2. “I am cold, even though the heat of early summer is adequate. I am cold because I cannot find my heart.”

— Sebastian Barry

3. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

4. “Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.”

— Sebastian Barry

5. “I knew immediately something was terribly wrong, but you can know that and not allow the thought in your head, at the front of your head. It dances around at the back, where it can’t be controlled. But the front of the head is where the pain begins.”

— Sebastian Barry

6. “I haven’t really written my plays and books – I’ve heard them. The stories are there already, singing in your genes and in your blood.”

— Sebastian Barry

7. “Terror is just the cousin of courage.”

— Sebastian Barry

8. “I had no desire to be seen by anyone, or talk to anyone. Sometimes out walking I would be in such a peculiar state of mind that I would rush home at the merest hint of another person.”

— Sebastian Barry

9. “I am old enough to know that time passing is just a trick, a convenience. Everything is always there, still unfolding, still happening. The past, the present, and the future, in the noggin eternally, like brushes, combs and ribbons in a handbag.”

— Sebastian Barry

10. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

12. “For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.”

— Sebastian Barry

13. “It had been a war of kingly poisons, in the air, in the memory, in the blood.”

— Sebastian Barry

14. “A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”

— Sebastian Barry

15. “I am easy as a woman, taut as a man. All my limbs is broke as a man, and fixed good as a woman. I lie down with the soul of woman and wake with the same. I don’t foresee no time where this ain’t true no more.”

— Sebastian Barry

16. “The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.”

— Sebastian Barry

17. “That is because at the close of the day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.”

— Sebastian Barry

18. “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?”

— Sebastian Barry

19. “A beard on a man is only a way of hiding something, his face of course, but also the inner matters, like a hedge around a secret garden, or a cover over a bird cage.”

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

21. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

22. “But Fr Gaunt was so clipped and trim he had no antennae at all for grief. He was like a singer who knows the words and can sing, but cannot sing the song as conceived in the heart of the composer. Mostly he was dry. He spoke over young and old with the same dry music. But.”

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

24. “He wondered suddenly and definitely for the first time in his life what words might be. Sounds and sense certainly, but something else also, a kind of natural music that explained a man’s heart or heartlessness, words as tempered as steel, as soft as air.”

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

26. “A Ford motorcar is a magical thing in the night with the spraying lamps against the pitch road and the smell of metal and perfume under the clothy roof.”

— Sebastian Barry

27. “What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking?”

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

29. “I rose and moved towards him. You would have done the same yourself. It is an ancient matter. Something propels you towards sudden grief, or perhaps also sometimes repels. You move away. I moved towards it, I couldn’t help it.”

— Sebastian Barry

30. “I guess love laughs at history a little.”

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

32. “Things that give you heart are rare enough, better note them in your head when you find them and not forget.”

— Sebastian Barry

33. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

34. “After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.”

— Sebastian Barry

35. “I miss her face, its beauty, and its beauty lost.”

— Sebastian Barry

36. “It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can.”

— Sebastian Barry

37. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

38. “The real comfort is that the history of the world contains so much grief that my small griefs are edged out, and are only cinders at the borders of the fire. I am saying this again because I want it to be true.”

— Sebastian Barry

39. “Because I thought it was still possible everything was all right. Why did I think that? Because I had not heard otherwise. I was in the middle of a mystery.”

— Sebastian Barry

40. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

41. “Men so sick they are dying of death.”

— Sebastian Barry

42. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

44. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

45. “Hunger takes away what you are. Everything we were was just nothing then.”

— Sebastian Barry

46. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

47. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

48. “All that remains of me now is a rumour of beauty.”

— Sebastian Barry

49. “Why should a man help another man? No need, the world don’t care about that. World is just a passing parade of cruel moments and long drear stretches where nothing going on but chicory drinking and whisky and cards.”

— Sebastian Barry

50. “The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see.”

— Sebastian Barry