Home > Author > Kevin Barry
21 " And now from the vantage of his years a terrible swoon comes down on him; Cynthia, for a moment, descends all the way through him. This is not a rare occurrence. He will never lose the feeling of the love that they had together, or the nausea of its absence. Hate is not the answer to love; death is its answer. "
― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier
22 " When we move by water, our hearts are moved. We are complicated fucking machines. "
23 " The days were cold as evil but the evenings spread magic from the sea inwards and stretched out and tapped the place until it was open to our dreaming. "
24 " He stops up—he’s had a stunning thought. Is there such a thing, he wants to know, as a positive crack-up? Where the mind breaks down and re-forms again but only to show the world more clearly than before. A mind left calm as a settled pool. "
― Kevin Barry , Beatlebone
25 " Oh give us a grim Tuesday of December, with the hardwind taking schleps at our heads, and the rain coming slantways off that hideous fucking ocean, and the grapes nearly frozen off us, and dirty ice caked up top of the puddles, and we are not happy, exactly, but satisfied in our despair. "
― Kevin Barry , City of Bohane
26 " The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths. "
27 " It was one of those summers you're nostalgic for before it even passes "
― Kevin Barry
28 " He was more than possessed by his crimes and excesses – he was the gaunt accumulation of them. "
29 " No...I knew a Martin.And was he wiley?If there was one thing he wasn't was wiley, John.Oh?Poor Martin was an inordinately stupid man. He could barely tie his shoelaces.A ha'penny short?Ah listen. Martin kept animals had more wile in them.What kind of animals?He'd sheep. A few cattle, I suppose. Though they'd have been wind-bothered up that way.They'd have been...Bothered, John. By the wind coming in. The way it would unseat cattle.Unseat them?Cornelius lowers his sad eyes -In the mind.You mean you'd have a cow'd take a turn?Cornelius squares his jaw.Do you realise you're looking at a man who's seen a cow step in front of a moving vehicle? Purposefully.On account of?Wind coming easterly. That's the kind of thing that can leave a beast beyond despair. Because of the pure evil sound of it, John. The way it would play across the country in an ominous way. An easterly? If it was to come across you for a fortnight and it might? Sleep gone out the window and a horrible black feeling racing through your fucken blood. Day and night. All sorts of thoughts of death and hopelessness. This is what you'd get on the tail end of an easterly wind. Man nor animal wouldn't be right after it. "
30 " Watch for the glamorous sentence that appears from nowhere - it might have plans for you. Watch out for the clauses that are elegantly strung , for the string of words bejewelled. Watch out for the ripe language-it means your words may be about to go off? "
31 " In the native way he was tormented now by his own happiness. "
― Kevin Barry , That Old Country Music
32 " The Irishmen look out blithely at the faces that pass by in a blur of the seven distractions—love, grief, pain, sentimentality, avarice, lust, want-of-death. "
33 " He was a country boy with his wires twisted all wrong. He should have never been let near a city. "
34 " But if he has nothing else to his name, he has his regrets, and these are not without value to the martyr's self-portrait displayed in his mind's eye.We come into the world on the top of a scream and the wave of our poor mother's roaring.She had a smile like a home-made explosive device. "
35 " It was peopled day and night by cirrhotic-looking old crooks and wastrel youths with insane mouths. "
36 " There is a stab of awareness at the beginning and at the end of love, and the feeling precisely replicates – it’s a twinge of cold certainty at either end of the affair, and it is twice terrifying. "
37 " The motions of the alcohol are familiar: the easy warming, the calm sustain, and now the slow grading into remorse. A melancholy hour falleth. As afflicts a gentleman of colourful history. But, if he has nothing else to his name, he has his regrets, and these are not without value to the martyr’s self-portrait displayed in his mind’s eye. I am fifty-one years old, he thinks, and still at least halfways in love with meself. All told you’d have to call it a fucken achievement. "
38 " There comes a time when you just have to live among your ghosts. You keep the conversation going. Elsewise the broad field of the future opens out as nothing but a vast emptiness. "
39 " He has a set of nerves on like a sack of fucking snakes. "
40 " She gathered into a bundle of herself, drew up her legs—Dilly had a complicated arrangement with furniture always, and she took a while to settle. She wore her weather on the tip of her nose. "