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Night Boat to Tangier QUOTES

Night Boat to Tangier QUOTES

1 " It’s freedom, she says. It’s poverty, Charlie says. Poverty is always for free. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

2 " But now he came up to himself slowly again—it was like rising through heavy water—and he was warmed by one of the great consolations: nothing very terrible lasts for very long. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

3 " 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. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

4 " Fucking Ireland. Its smiling fiends. Its speaking rocks. Its haunted fields. Its sea memory. Its wildness and strife. Its haunt of melancholy. Its haunt of melancholy. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

5 " A troubled silence descends—the old times are shifting again; they are rearranging like fault lines. The past will not relent. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

6 " We come into the world on the tip of a scream and the wave of our poor mothers’ roaring. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

7 " 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

8 " When we move by water, our hearts are moved. We are complicated fucking machines. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

9 " 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. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

10 " 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. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

11 " He was more than possessed by his crimes and excesses – he was the gaunt accumulation of them. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

12 " 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? "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

13 " 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. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

14 " He was a country boy with his wires twisted all wrong. He should have never been let near a city. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

15 " 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. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

16 " It was peopled day and night by cirrhotic-looking old crooks and wastrel youths with insane mouths. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

17 " 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. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

18 " 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. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

19 " 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. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier

20 " 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. "

― Kevin Barry , Night Boat to Tangier