Vera Brittain Quotes

#1. We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence.

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#2. However deep our devotion may be to parents or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire.

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#3. I am less blindly confident than I once was, for I have been learning a truer estimate of myself, my failings and limitations, in these dark days. I have learnt to hope that if there be a Judgment Day of some kind, God will not see us with our own eyes, nor judge us as we judge ourselves.

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#4. I can think of few important movements for reform in which success was won by any method other than that of an energetic minority presenting the indifferent majority with a fait accompli, which was then accepted.

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#5. Why, I wondered, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth? That period of life when every sorrow seems permanent and every setback insuperable.

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#6. There is a strange lack of dignity in conquest; the dull, uncomplaining endurance of defeat appears more worthy of congratulation.

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#7. College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation

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#8. It seems delightfully incongruous,' he wrote from Armentie'res, 'that there should be good shops and fine buildings and comfortable beds less than half an hour's walk from the trenches

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#9. An author who waits for the right 'mood' will soon find that 'moods' get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether.

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#10. There seemed to be nothing left in the world, for I felt that Roland had taken with him all my future and Edward all my past.

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#11. Could I write an autobiographical novel, I wonder? Can one make a book out of the very essence of one's self? Perhaps so, if one was left with one's gift stripped bare of all that made it worth having, and nothing else was left ...

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#12. There is an abiding beauty which may be appreciated by those who will see things as they are and who will ask for no reward except to see.

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#13. The tragedy of journalism lies in its impermanence; the very topicality which gives it brilliance condemns it to an early death. Too often it is a process of flinging bright balloons in the path of the hurricane, a casting of priceless petals upon the rushing surface of a stream.

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#14. Most men, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war.

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#15. It never seems to occur to anybody that some women may not want to find husbands.

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#16. Between 1914 and 1919 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually re-dedicating themselves - as I did that morning in Boulogne - to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal.

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#17. Venice is all sea and sculpture ...

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#18. The idea that it is necessary to go to a university in order to become a successful writer ... is one of those fantasies that surround authorship.

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#19. It is probably true to say that the largest scope for change still lies in men's attitude to women, and in women's attitude to themselves.

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#20. Her mind was like a spring-tide in full flood; rich, shining, vigorous, and capable of infinite variety.

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#21. You know you wouldn't be happy unless you married an odd sort of person

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#22. Politics is the executive expression of human immaturity.

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#23. Belated maternity has had its compensations; small children have a habit of conferring persistent youth upon their parents, and by their eager vitality postpone the unenterprising cautions and timidities of middle age.

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#24. If the would-be writer studies people in their everyday lives and discovers how to make his characters in their quieter moods interesting to his readers, he will have learned far more than he can ever learn from the constant presentation of crises.

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#25. The joys of motherhood are not excessively apparent during the first few weeks of a baby's life.

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#26. I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading.

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#27. At sixteen, he was inclined to be rather priggish and self-righteous. Not such bad qualities in adolescence after all, since most of us have to be self-righteous before we can be righteous.

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#28. When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.

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#29. The pacifist's task today is to find a method of helping and healing which provides a revolutionary constructive
substitute for war.

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#30. The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet's eyes.

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#31. Meek wifehood is no part of my profession; I am your friend, but never your possession.

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#32. Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the war.

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#33. That's the worst of sorrow . . . it's always a vicious circle. It makes one tense and hard and disagreeable, and this means that one repels and antagonises people, and then they dislike and avoid one--and that means more isolation and still more sorrow.

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#34. At college, more than anywhere else, one was likely to make the friendships that supported one through life.

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#35. A number of neurotic ancestors, combined with with persistent, unresolved terrors of childhood, had deprived me of the comfortable gift of natural courage.

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#36. [I] wondered if he was looking up at that same moon, far away, and thinking of me as I was thinking of him.

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#37. Modern war and modern civilisation are utterly incompatible ... one or the other must go.

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#38. Goes to war, still encourages the production of unwanted C3 children by exhausted mothers, and still compels married partners who hate one another to live together in the name of morality.

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#39. I thought that spring must last forevermore, For I was young and loved, and it was May.

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#40. Few things are more rewarding than a child's open uncalculating devotion.

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#41. He was, I told myself, a unique experience in my existence; I never think definitely of him as man or boy, as older or younger, taller or shorter than I am, but always of him as a mind in tune with mine, in which many of the notes are quite different from mine but are all in the same key.

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#42. She seemed to have waited so long to hear those words that for a moment the earth stood still, and the moon, the trees, the grotesque shadows across the heath, became in that instant transfixed in her memory. How shall I bear this exquisite happiness? It is too much: it will destroy me.

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#43. How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die

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#44. I joined the Pass Mods. class and studied the cyropaedia and Livy's Wars with a resentful feeling that there was quite enough war in the world without having to read about it in Latin

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#45. If only the comfortable prosperity of the Victorian age hadn't lulled us into a false conviction of individual security and made us believe that what was going on outside our homes didn't matter to us, the Great War might never have happened.

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#46. When the sound of victorious guns burst over London at 11 a.m. on November 11th, 1918, the men and women who looked incredulously into each other's faces did not cry jubilantly: " We've won the war! " They only said: " The War is over.

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#47. I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning.

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#48. Babies are a nuisance, of course. But so does everything seem to be that is worthwhile - husbands and books and committees and being loved and everything. We have to choose between ease and rich unrest.

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#49. I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.

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#50. It is impossible," I concluded, "to find any satisfaction in the thought of 25,000 slaughtered Germans, left to mutilation and decay; the destruction of men as though beasts, whether they be English, French, German or anything else, seems a crime to the whole march of civilization.

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#51. All that a pacifist can undertake
but it is a very great deal
is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.

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