Top 120 Sebastian Barry Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Hunger takes away what you are. Everything we were was just nothing then.”

— Sebastian Barry

52. “If it had been a great necessity, if it had been contingents of an army meeting to overwhelm the enemy by stealth, it might not have worked out so neatly. But fate it would seem is a perfect strategist and will work miracles of timing to assist our destruction.”

— Sebastian Barry

53. “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

54. “How is that for some people drinking is a short-term loan on the spirit, but for others a heavy mortgage on the soul?”

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

56. “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

57. “Four men killed that day. The phrase sat up in Willie’s head like a rat and made a nest for itself there.”

— Sebastian Barry

58. “But I had no idea what I looked like. Children may feel epic and large to theyselves and yet be only scraps to view.”

— Sebastian Barry

59. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

60. “For I did not want him to see, or to question me, for here contains already secrets, and my secrets are my fortune and my sanity.”

— Sebastian Barry

61. “I smiled at him my oldest old-woman smile, as if I did not quite understand.”

— Sebastian Barry

62. “There is seldom a difficulty with religion where there is friendship.”

— Sebastian Barry

63. “Names, names, all passed away, forgotten, mere birdsong in the bushes of things.”

— Sebastian Barry

64. “There was nothing to see but in my mind’s eye I could see everything, because she had supplied the ancient cinema of this place.”

— Sebastian Barry

65. “My head is already stuffed with grief I suppose like a pomegranate with its red seeds. I can only bleed grief, having no room for more.”

— Sebastian Barry

66. “Of course I was young, very young, but, as I remember it, no one is ever quite so old as a fifteen-year-old girl.”

— Sebastian Barry

67. “He carried a highly ecclesiastical umbrella, like something real and austere, that said its prayers at night in the hatstand. I.”

— Sebastian Barry

68. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

69. “I could feel myself melting away. I thought I was like water but I had no cup to hold me.”

— Sebastian Barry

70. “What he must have suffered, in his lovely English privacy.”

— Sebastian Barry

71. “A child is never the author of his own history.”

— Sebastian Barry

72. “I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old, the first pattern in them, and cherish them for that.”

— Sebastian Barry

73. “It would be a very good thing if occasionally I thought I knew what I was doing.”

— Sebastian Barry

74. “It’s a dark thing when the world sets no value on you and your kin, and then Death comes stalking in, in his bloody boots”.”

— Sebastian Barry

75. “You only had to look like you done something wrong in America and they would hang you, if you were poor.”

— Sebastian Barry

76. “Everything bad gets shot at in America, says John Cole, and everything good too.”

— Sebastian Barry

77. “To the extend that a man with the soul filleted out of him could be happy. Since the things he had wished for were no more, he wished for nothing. He breathed in and out. That was all.”

— Sebastian Barry

78. “Because faithfulness is not a human question, but a divine one.”

— Sebastian Barry

79. “Her greatest wish I should think was that I would remain exactly as I was, and how I regret that that was not to be. It was only for her roses that she wished for change, the strange moment of loral enchantment when the branch of a rose mutates, and shows a “sport,” something new arising from the known rose. A leap in beauty.”

— Sebastian Barry

80. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

81. “Some friendships though, even strong and interesting ones, seem to have quite a short term, and cannot be prolonged.”

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

83. “Little sins of omission that loom large now. You could go mad.”

— Sebastian Barry

84. “I am clearly content to be beyond help.”

— Sebastian Barry

85. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

86. “The years return us gradually to the afflictions and shames of childhood, it is a curiosity of existence.”

— Sebastian Barry

87. “And whatever my life had been up to that day, it was another life after that. And that is the gospel truth.”

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

89. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

90. “Something had happened to that sorrow. It had gone rancid in him, he thought; it had boiled down to something he didn’t understand. The pith of sorrow was in the upshot a little seed of death.”

— Sebastian Barry

91. “Grizzled old bastard like him don’t go providing death-bed transformations.”

— Sebastian Barry

92. “How I would like to say that I loved my father so much that I could not have lived without him, but such an avowal would be proved false in time. Those that we love, those essential beings, are removed from us at the will of the Almighty, or the devils that usurp him. It is as if a huge lump of lead were lain over the soul, such deaths, and where that soul was previously weightless, now is a secret and ruinous burden at the very heart of us.”

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

94. “In the darkness as we lie side by side John Cole’s left hand snakes over under the sheets and takes a hold of my right hand. We listen to the cries of the night revellers outside and hear the horses tramping along the ways. 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

95. “History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man’s dominion of the earth.”

— Sebastian Barry

96. “The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea.”

— Sebastian Barry

97. “His people had hogs there till the bottom fell out of hogs. The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see. So it was with the world, restless, kind of brutal. Always going on. Not waiting for no man.”

— Sebastian Barry

98. “The blood is intact in our bodies but we feel like we are bleeding into the earth.”

— Sebastian Barry

99. “It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.”

— Sebastian Barry

100. “We were nothing to them. I think now of the great value we put on what we were and I wonder what does it mean when another people judge you to be worth so little you were only to be killed? How our pride in everything was crushed so small it disappeared until it was just specks of things floating away on the wind.”

— Sebastian Barry