Top 120 Sebastian Barry Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I know she absolutely delights in the improvement of the weather, in the turning of the year.”

— Sebastian Barry

52. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

54. “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.”

— Sebastian Barry

55. “The men hunched around, talking with the gaiety of souls about to eat plentifully, with the empty dark country about us, and the strange fabric of frost and frozen wind falling on our shoulders, and the great black sky of stars above us like a huge tray of gems and diamonds.”

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Sebastian Barry

70. “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

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

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

74. “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

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

— Sebastian Barry

76. “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

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

— Sebastian Barry

78. “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

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

— Sebastian Barry

80. “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

81. “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

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

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Sebastian Barry

89. “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

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

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

92. “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

93. “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

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

— Sebastian Barry

95. “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

96. “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

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

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

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

— Sebastian Barry

100. “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