Barry Unsworth Quotes

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 ...

But whatever the ramifications, whatever turns the path takes, the beginning is always there, in a particular moment, a particular point of access.

At the same time he could hardly believe what he had been reading. It struck him as verging on madness. This wild confession, this owing to a crime so outlandish, so totally different from the true ones of mating and theft of the negroes, outraged him with its insolence and perversity. In the conflict of these feelings Erasmus was swept by doubt and loneliness. His whole being seemed under threat of dissolution. What became of law, of legitimacy, of established order, if a man could assume such attitudes of private morality, decide for himself where his fault lay? It turned everything upside down. He could think of nothing more damnable. And yet ... He remembered suddenly the second, rarer smile his cousin had, the one that came slowly, transforming his face. Briefly, unwillingly, Erasmus glimpsed the possibility of freedom.

Only way to live here is day by day, same as anywhere.

I spent most of the '60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey. These are countries where the ancient past is interfused with the daily present, and I remember being struck with wonder at the constant sense of continuity and connection, the reminders that lie in wait for you at every turn.

Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.

The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever ...

It is everyone's bounden duty to try to get more than they have got already. If you have got two shillin' you try to make it into four shillin' ... there is no end to it.

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.

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.

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.

Those confiding their pain cannot know at the outset how much they will be required to relive it.

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.

I'm unemployable in any other capacity.

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.

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.

Useful thing a warrant. Murder and theft change their names if you have one.

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.

Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way

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.

It is always through arbitrary combinations that experience enslaves the memory.

I like the condition of being an outsider, just passing through.

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.

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.

Doubt is the ally of hope, not its enemy, and together they made all the blessing he had.

Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising.

I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.

Justice is a mighty fine thing.

Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good ...

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.

I was born for better things.

In my generation, history was taught in terms of grand figures, men on whom the destiny of the nation hinged, quintessential heroes.

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.

There are no stronger fetters than those we forge for ourselves.

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.