The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.
Sebastian Barry
birth life death world philosophical thoughts father part
If it had been a great necessity, if it had been contingents of an army meeting to overwhelm the enemy by stealth, it might not have worked out so neatly. But fate it would seem is a perfect strategist and will work miracles of timing to assist our destruction.
fate
I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old, the first pattern in them, and cherish them for that.
god
After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.
happiness world happy beautiful
It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can.
happiness happy
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.
truth history
Roseanne, Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self, would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me?
beauty youth identity growing-up
It is always worth itemizing happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers of happiness while you can.
time memory joy
And what else could we have come here for, except to sense these tiny victories? Not the big victories that crush and kill the victor. Not the wars and civil ructions, but the saving grace of a Hollandaise sauce that has escaped all the possibilities of culinary disaster and is being spread like a yellow prayer on a plump cod steak - victoriously.
victory meaning joy affirmation
There are some sufferings that we seem as a creature to forget, or we would never survive as a creature among all the other creatures.
suffering
And whatever my life had been up to that day, it was another life after that. And that is the gospel truth.
change truth
Four men killed that day. The phrase sat up in Willie's head like a rat and made a nest for itself there
war awareness realization
Trench dirt didn't always wash out, I am sure.
war soldiers
It had been a war of kingly poisons, in the air, in the memory, in the blood.
death war wwi
When they came into their trench he felt small enough. The biggest thing there was the roaring of Death and the smallest thing was a man. Bombs not so far off distressed the earth of Belgium, disgorged great heaps of it, and did everything except kill him immediately, as he half expected them to do.
death war
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