The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to
say. He forget 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
The Secret Scripture. |
That place where I was born was a cold town. Even the mountains
stood away. They were not sure, no more than me, of that dark
spot, those same mountains.
There was a black river that flowed through the town, and if
it had no grace for mortal beings, it did for swans, and many
swans resorted there, and even rode the river like some kind
of plunging animal, in floods.
Sebastian Barry
The Secret Scripture. |
And all those boys of Europe born in those times, and thereabouts
those times, Russian, Belgian, Serbian, Irish, English, Scottish,
Welsh, Italian, Prussian, German, Austrian, Turkish – and
Canadian, Australian, American, Zulu, Gurkha, Cossack, and all
the rest – their fate was written in a ferocious chapter
of the book of life, certainly. Those millions of mothers and
their million gallons of mothers' milk, millions of instances
of small-talk and baby-talk, beatings and kisses, ganseys and
shoes, piled up in history in great ruined heaps, with a loud
and broken music, human stories told for nothing, for ashes,
for death's amusement, flung on the mighty scrap heap of souls,
all those million boys in all their humours to be milled by
the mill-stones of a coming war.
Sebastian Barry
A Long Long Way. |
The curse of the world is people thinking thoughts that are
only thoughts which have been given to them. They're not their
own thoughts. They're like cuckoos in their heads. Their own
thoughts are tossed out and cuckoo thoughts are put in instead.
Sebastian Barry
A Long Long Way. |
There is seldom a difficulty with religion where there is
friendship.
Sebastian Barry
The Secret Scripture. |
That place where I was born was a cold town. Even the mountains
stood away. They were not sure, no more than me, of that dark
spot, those same mountains.
There was a black river that flowed through the town, and if
it had no grace for mortal beings, it did for swans, and many
swans resorted there, and even rode the river like some kind
of plunging animal, in floods.
Sebastian Barry
The Secret Scripture. |
I wonder why anything is.
Sebastian Barry
The Secret Scripture. |
Morality has its own civil wars, with its own victims in their
own time and place.
Sebastian Barry
The Secret Scripture. |
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