Sebastian Barry quotes:

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.

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

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

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

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

Trench dirt didn't always wash out, I am sure.

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

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.

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.

It was an earthquake, tearing at the sons of America, trying to swallow them up. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful sons, that women had reared, had kissed and screamed at, and that fathers had stared intently in their cots, to see themselves in the wondrous mirrors of their babies.

The trust of those in dark need is forgiving work.

I am dwelling on things I love, even if a measure of tragedy is stitched into everything, if you follow the thread long enough

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.

Roseanne, Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self, would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me?

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

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.

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

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.

Fred Astaire. Not a handsome man. He said himself he couldn't sing. He was balding his whole life. He danced like a cheetah runs with the grace of the first creation. I mean, that first week. On one of those days God created Fred Astaire. Saturday maybe, since that was the day for the pictures. When you s Fred you felt better about everything. He was a cure. He was bottled in the films and all around the earth, from Castlebar to Cairo, he healed the halt and the blind. That's the gospel truth. St. Fred. Fred the Redeemer.

He loved telling stories. He had been everywhere in the world. The northwest frontier, the landscape of the Hindu Kush, was one of the great landscapes of my childhood because he used to evoke it with his stories. He taught me the sequence of ranks in the British army when I was about eight. I was in the bed with him while he told me everything about his life - except, probably, the real things, because of course you couldn't go there.

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.

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.

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.

I thought if I was going to live a life in this land I was accidentally born on, I must people it; I must have a history. . .. I'm looking for these people inside me, wherever they may be; that is my form of research.

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

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.

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

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.

The world is not full of betrayers, it is full of people with decent motives and a full desire to do right by those who know them and love them. This is a little-known truth, but I think it is a truth nonetheless. Empirically, from all the years of my work, I would attest to that. I know it is a miraculous conclusion, but there it is. We like to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer.

There is seldom a difficulty with religion where there is friendship.

What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking?