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Sebastian Barry

Sebastian Barry Books

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A Long Long Way

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Annie Dunne

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“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.”

WordsMemoryDelusionSimileSebastian BarryThe Secret ScriptureUnreliable NarratorImaginings
Book:The Secret Scripture
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“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.”

TruthHistory
Book:The Secret Scripture
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“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.”

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Book:The Secret Scripture
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“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.”

Fred Astaire
Book:The Secret Scripture
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