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41 " I knew, I knew any proper, decent life was over. The word of a man like that was like a death sentence . . . I had known it all along, but it is a very different matter to know your sentence, and then to hear it spoken by your judge . . . Truest of all things, there was no one to help me, no one to stand at my side. "
― Sebastian Barry , The Secret Scripture (McNulty Family)
42 " There is a moment in the history of every beaten child when his mind parts with hopes of dignity — pushes off hope like a boat without a rower, and lets it go as it will on the stream, and resigns himself to the tally stick of pain. "
43 " 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. "
44 " I smiled at him my oldest old-woman smile, as if I did not quite understand. "
45 " Do you know the grief of it? I hope not. The grief that does not age, that does not go away with time, like most griefs and human matters. That is the grief that is always there, swinging a little in a derelict house, my father, my father.I cry out for him. "
46 " I am clearly content to be beyond help. "
47 " 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. "
48 " I did not intend to cry out, but as you will see these small actions, associated in most people's minds with the ease and happiness of life, are to me still like knives in my heart to think of. "
49 " My story hurries me on. "
50 " How difficult it is to live. "
51 " And of course I started to cry. Not for myself strangely enough, though I am sure I could have, with capital and interest, but no, not for myself. For my mother? Who can really itemise the cause of our human tears? "
52 " I wonder why that is. I wonder why anything is. "
53 " A memory so clear, so wonderful, so beyond the bounds of possibility.I know it.My head is as clear as a glass. "
54 " 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. "
55 " 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 saw 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. "
56 " 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. "
57 " For myself, hand on heart, those things never bothered me. It is one of the graces of married life that for some magical reason we always look the same to each other. Even our friends never seem to grow old. What a boon that is, and never suspected by me when I was young. But I suppose, otherwise, what would we do? There has never been a person in an old people’s home that hasn’t looked around dubiously at the other inhabitants. They are the old ones, they are the club that no one wants to join. But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body. "
58 " That is because at the close of the day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body. "
59 " Because faithfulness is not a human question, but a divine one. "
60 " The terror and hurt in my story happened because when I was young I thought others were the authors of my fortune or misfortune; I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves. "