Barry Unsworth > Quotes

“Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Money is sacred as everyone knows... So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it. Once a man is in debt he becomes a flesh and blood form of money, a walking investment. You can do what you like with him, you can work him to death or you can sell him. This cannot be called cruelty or greed because we are seeking only to recover our investment and that is a sacred duty.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Love does not stand still, as everyone knows; it is always adding to its own shape whether by advance or retreat. Wounds can be absorbed, but only like elements embodied in a story; they are always there, part of the meaning.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“A man may go through life and remain ignorant of himself he may think himself as other than he truly is and he may die with this illusion still intact because no circumstance of his life has obliged him to revise it.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Only way to live here is day by day, same as anywhere.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Sometimes in storm weather the shore had fluttered with disabled swallows. They crouched lower for his approach, without strength to escape. In his hands they pulsed with that same pulse. He had taken a bird and warmed it between his hands or inside his jacket, brought the life back until it was able to fly. Sometimes, released from his hands, they circled once around him before flying away; in gratitude, or so the child had believed--and the belief had survived all the man's science.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“I knew little of the world, as the Justice had seen, but I knew that we can lose ourselves in the parts we play and if this continues too long we will not find our way back again.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever...”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Doubt is the ally of hope, not its enemy, and together they made all the blessing he had.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“But what a man sees still must depend on what he looks for. While I have eyes of my own, I shall not need to borrow yours.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former . . .”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“There are no stronger fetters than those we forge for ourselves.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Wickedness is too common in the world
for us to think much of why and wherefore.
It is more natural to ask about the rarer thing
and wonder why people sometimes do good.”
― Barry Unsworth

“The flood of cheap manufactures, for which the people have no need,destroys their industries. They become dependent on this trade and the demand for goods can only be met by enslaving their fellows.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“I was born for better things.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“This praise, though far from fulsome, gave me pleasure and that is to my shame. But there was something in him, some power of spirit, that made me want to please him. Perhaps, it occurs to me now, it was no more than the intensity of his wish. Men are distinguished by the power of their wanting. What this one wanted became his province and his meal, he governed it and fed on it from the first moment of desire. Besides, with the perversity of our nature, being tested had made me more desire to succeed, though knowing the enterprise to be sinful.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“Numbers of men are getting richer and greater numbers are getting poorer. Alas, both classes have higher expectations these days. In Short, sir, there has been a leap in bribes.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“The successful cannot be unhappy -- it was a contradiction in terms.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“A little bit of kindness goes a long way with women.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“I glimpsed the man's face with the shine of death on it. They laid him down there in the open. They had brought him there to be close to his death, I understood this also at the same moment. For who would wish to see a companion gasp his last on a jolting cart? We desire to keep the dying and the newly dead close before our eyes so as to give them full meed of pity. Our Lord was brought down to be pitied, on the Cross He was too far away.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“Grief works its own perversions and betrayals; the shape of what we have lost is as subject to corruption as the mortal body...”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Useful thing a warrant. Murder and theft change their names if you have one.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“No latitude makes any difference to what men will do to other men, whether for gain or in the name of justice.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Afterward I remembered these things very clearly, with that longing we feel sometimes to recover a state of life that we have lost for ever, though it is perhaps that we have lost it is all its value.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“Wilson had been killed by everybody. It was this that made his death special, the children had been told. It was justice, it was all the people showing how much they hated this crime. Killing was justice when everybody joined in.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“When you in de right you heart strong you no 'fraid nottin'.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“But that sacred hunger we spoke of justifies all.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“A man can live free and not seek to limit the freedom of others so long as no one seeks to limit his.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now than another aspect of that ancient urge - much older than the desire for truth - to command attention, dominate one's fellows.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

“Those confiding their pain cannot know at the outset how much they will be required to relive it.”
― Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger