Michael

“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

“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

“Isn’t it something,” Hettie said softly, “what ol’ New York really is? We come here to be free and find life’s worse here than back home. The white folks here just color it different. They don’t mind you sitting next to ’em on the subway, or riding the bus in the front seat, but if you asks for the same pay, or wants to live next door, or get so beat down you don’t wanna stand up and sing about how great America is, they’ll bust down on you so hard pus’ll come out your ears.”
― James McBride, Deacon King Kong

“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