“Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Sacred Hunger
“Only way to live here is day by day, same as anywhere.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from 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, quote from Sacred Hunger
“There are no stronger fetters than those we forge for ourselves.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from 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, quote from Sacred Hunger
“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, quote from Sacred Hunger
“The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever...”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from Sacred Hunger
“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, quote from Sacred Hunger
“I was born for better things.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from Sacred Hunger
“Doubt is the ally of hope, not its enemy, and together they made all the blessing he had.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from Sacred Hunger
“The successful cannot be unhappy -- it was a contradiction in terms.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from Sacred Hunger
“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, quote from 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, quote from Sacred Hunger
“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.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from Sacred Hunger
“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.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from Sacred Hunger
“But that sacred hunger we spoke of justifies all.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from Sacred Hunger
“The heart is a vital organ, but it is a faulty guide to conduct. It is the mind makes judgements and comparisons, furnishes evidence on which ideas of truth can be founded.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from Sacred Hunger
“Those confiding their pain cannot know at the outset how much they will be required to relive it.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from 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, quote from Sacred Hunger
“It is always through arbitrary combinations that experience enslaves the memory.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from Sacred Hunger
“A little bit of kindness goes a long way with women.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from Sacred Hunger
“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, quote from 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, quote from Sacred Hunger
“When you in de right you heart strong you no 'fraid nottin'.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from Sacred Hunger
“Useful thing a warrant. Murder and theft change their names if you have one.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from 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, quote from Sacred Hunger
“Justice is a mighty fine thing.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from Sacred Hunger
Barry Unsworth
Born place: in Wingate, The United Kingdom
Born date August 8, 1930
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“You've been through a great deal," his mother conceded. "But the back strengthens to the burdens it has to bear, and I'd like to see a little more backbone in you.”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from Abide with Me
“You know you know you have a great friend when you can go months or even years without speaking and as soon as you see each other again it's like no time has passed at all?”
― Jodie Beau, quote from The Good Life
“The world was full of beauty.
She wanted to grab hold of it and take it down into her bones. Yet always it seemed beyond her grasp. Sometimes only by a little, like now. The thinnest membrane.
Usually, though, by miles.
She couldn’t expect to be that kind of happy all the time. She knew that.
But sometimes you could. Sometimes you should be allowed a tiny bit of joy that should stay with you for more than five minutes. That wasn’t too much to ask. To have a moment like this, and be able to hold on to it.
To cross that membrane, and feel alive.”
― Sara Zarr, quote from The Lucy Variations
“Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.”
― Camilla Gibb, quote from Sweetness in the Belly
“Ancient Egypt was doubly fortunate, and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth, in that it possessed two activities, namely, pyramid-building as well as the search for the precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of man by being consumed, did not stale with abundance. The Middle Ages built cathedrals and sang dirges. Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York. Thus we are so sensible, have schooled ourselves to so close a semblance of prudent financiers, taking careful thought before we add to the 'financial' burdens of posterity by building them houses to live in, that we have no such easy escape from the sufferings of unemployment. We have to accept them as an inevitable result of applying to the conduct of the State the maxims which are best calculated to 'enrich' an individual by enabling him to pile up claims to enjoyment which he does not intend to exercise at any definite time.”
― John Maynard Keynes, quote from The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
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