The Secret Scripture Quotes

“What can I tell you further? I once lived among humankind, and found them in their generality to be cruel and cold, and yet could mention the names of three or four that were like angels.

I suppose we measure the importance of our days by those few angels we spy among us, and yet aren't like them.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“I had no desire to be seen by anyone, or talk to anyone. Sometimes out walking I would be in such a peculiar state of mind that I would rush home at the merest hint of another person.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“I am content to say that caught as I was, without rescuers as I was in that moment, there was a fierce, dark fury moving through me, wave upon wave, like the sea itself, that was bizarrely a comfort. My face maybe showing only a shadow of it, as faces will . . .

Rage, dark rage, lightened by nothing.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“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

“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.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“I know she absolutely delights in the improvement of the weather, in the turning of the year.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“I smiled at him my oldest old-woman smile, as if I did not quite understand.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“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.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“My fate, my fate as woeful as my father's, my ridiculous, heartless, funny fate.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“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.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“What he must have suffered, in his lovely English privacy.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“I am clearly content to be beyond help.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“I must admit there are 'memories' in my head that are curious even to me.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Because I thought it was still possible everything was all right. Why did I think that? Because I had not heard otherwise. I was in the middle of a mystery.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“All that remains of me now is a rumour of beauty.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Some friendships though, even strong and interesting ones, seem to have quite a short term, and cannot be prolonged.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“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.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“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.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“My story hurries me on.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“How difficult it is to live.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Little sins of omission that loom large now. You could go mad.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“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?”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“What would have comforted that writhing woman in a lost bed in the lost land of Strandhill I do not know. If I were a horse they would have shot me out of mercy.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Unfathomable. Fathoms. I wonder is that the difficulty, that my memories and my imaginings are lying deeply in the same place? Or one on top of the other like layers of shells and sand in a piece of limestone, so that they have become the same element, and I cannot distinguish one from the other with any ease, unless it is from close, close looking?

Which is why I am so afraid to speak to Dr. Grene, lest I give him only imaginings.

Imaginings. A nice sort of a word for catastrophe and delusion.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“I wonder why that is. I wonder why anything is.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Terrible, dreepy, dark February weather I remember, and the worst, most frightened days of my life.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“A savage sense entered me, of being of such small account in the world that I wasn't to be helped, that priest and woman and man had put out an edict that I wasn't to be helped, I was to be left to the elements, just as I was, a walking animal, forsaken.

Maybe it was then that some part of me leapt away from myself, something fled from my brain, I don't know.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“A memory so clear, so wonderful, so beyond the bounds of possibility.

I know it.

My head is as clear as a glass.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Bexhill is only about fifty miles from Gatwick in that part of England so English it is almost something else, unnameable. The names reek of candyfloss and old battles.Brighton, Hastings.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Well, I supposed all these things. 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, The Secret Scripture