Morality Play Quotes

“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.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“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.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“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.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“Afterward I remembered these things very clearly, with that longing we feel sometimes to recover a state of life that we have lost for ever, though it is perhaps that we have lost it is all its value.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“If we make our own meanings, God will oblige us to answer our own questions: He will leave us in the void without the comfort of his word.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“The player is always trapped in his own play but he must never allow the spectators to suspect this, they must always think that he is free. Thus the great art of the player is not in showing but in concealing.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“When silence falls on the world then there is always one small sound that grows louder. I could hear the whispering and sighing of the snow and this sound was within me and without.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“She talked in flat tones, keeping her mouth half-closed so that the words came out in a mutter without changing the lines of her face. Margaret had suffered much hardship and degradation of body and was unwilling now to offer the world anything superfluous.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“From pride there can only come brands for the burning. The resin of the wicked branch makes it flame more brightly and it may seem for a time to light up the dark; but it is soon consumed away, leaving the world darker than before.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“This made a pattern of movement and gesture very effective and it provoked laughter, which is a welcome thing as saving from silence, but also frightening when there are many laughing together -- it is then a sea with strange tides. Players swim in the rise and fall of it and if they lose the mastery they drown.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“I am new to playing but it has seemed to me like dreaming. The player is himself and another. When he looks at the others in the play he knows he is part of their dreaming just as they are part of his. From this come thoughts and words that outside the play he would not readily admit to his mind.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“Justice is less easily applied to the strong than to the defenseless.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“The justices are like the priests, spawn of hell, ravening wolves that harry the sheep and feast on the blood of the poor. But the time will come, the people will turn. I say to the people, be of good heart, do as the wise husbandman who gathered the wheat into his barn but uprooted the tares and burned them.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

“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.”
― Barry Unsworth, Morality Play