The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Sebastian Barry

Sebastian Barry

And what else could we have come here for, except to sense these tiny victories? Not the big victories that crush and kill the victor. Not the wars and civil ructions, but the saving grace of a Hollandaise sauce that has escaped all the possibilities of culinary disaster and is being spread like a yellow prayer on a plump cod steak – victoriously.

affirmation, joy, meaning, victory

Sebastian Barry

A child is never the author of his own history.

childhood, control, fate, history, life

Sebastian Barry

I guess love laughs at history a little.

Sebastian Barry

I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.

conversation, death, silence

Sebastian Barry

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.

birth, death, life, philosophical, thoughts

Sebastian Barry

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.

happiness, happy

Sebastian Barry

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

beautiful, happiness, happy, world

Sebastian Barry

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

I was well aware how famously or infamously secretive these old institutions can be, no more than ourselves, a mixture of worry, lost power, perhaps even concern. That the truth may not always be desirable, that one thing leads to another thing, that facts not only lead forward to resolution, but backwards into the shadows, and sometimes into the various little hells we make for each other.

Sebastian Barry

It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.

Sebastian Barry

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