Quotes About Siegfried Sassoon

#1. I am not a bit afraid of Siegfried Sassoon. That man can think. I am afraid only of people who cannot think.

Winston Churchill

#2. 'Undertones of War' by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book.

Pat Barker

#3. I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .

George Packer

#4. Man, it seemed, had been created to jab the life out of Germans.

Siegfried Sassoon

#5. In me the tiger sniffs the rose.

Siegfried Sassoon

#6. All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities.

Siegfried Sassoon

#7. One evening I asked whether he [Rivers] thought I was suffering from shell-shock.
'Certainly not,' he replied.
'What have I got then?'
'Well, you appear to be suffering from an anti-war complex.

Siegfried Sassoon

#8. And the wind upon its way whispered the boughs of May, And touched the nodding peony flowers to bid them waken.

Siegfried Sassoon

#9. Alone he staggered on until he found
Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair
To the dazed, muttering creatures underground
Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.

Siegfried Sassoon

#10. I keep such music in my brain
No din this side of death can quell;
Glory exulting over pain,
And beauty, garlanded in hell.

Siegfried Sassoon

#11. The visionless officialized fatuityThat once kept Europe safe for Perpetuity.

Siegfried Sassoon

#12. Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin they think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.

Siegfried Sassoon

#13. Who's this - alone with stone and sky? It's only my old dog and I - It's only him; it's only me; Alone with stone and grass and tree. What share we most - we two together? Smells, and awareness of the weather. What is it makes us more than dust? My trust in him; in me his trust.

Siegfried Sassoon

#14. I didn't want to die - not before I'd finished reading The Return of the Native anyhow.

Siegfried Sassoon

#15. Life for the majority of the population.
Is an unlovely struggle against unfair odds.
Culminating in a cheap funeral.

Siegfried Sassoon

#16. I did not dread the dark winter as people do when they have lost their youth and live alone in some great city.

Siegfried Sassoon

#17. Let my soul, a shining tree, Silver branches lift towards thee, Where on a hallowed winter's night The clear-eyed angels may alight.

Siegfried Sassoon

#18. I died in hell. They called it Passchendaele.

Siegfried Sassoon

#19. I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

Siegfried Sassoon

#20. When Dick was killed last week he looked like that, Flapping along the fire-step like a fish, After the blazing crump had knocked him flat ... . How many dead? As many as ever you wish. Don't count 'em; they're too many. Who'll buy my nice fresh corpses, two a penny?

Siegfried Sassoon

#21. Mute in that golden silence hung with green,
Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes
Remembrance of all beauty that has been,
And stillness from the pools of Paradise.

Siegfried Sassoon

#22. Mud and rain and wretchedness and blood. Why should jolly soldier-boys complain? God made these before the roofless Flood - Mud and rain.

Siegfried Sassoon

#23. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

Siegfried Sassoon

#24. And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die
in bed.

Siegfried Sassoon

#25. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

Siegfried Sassoon

#26. In me the tiger sniffs the rose.
Look in my heart, kind friends, and tremble,
Since there your elements assemble.

Siegfried Sassoon

#27. The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.

Siegfried Sassoon

#28. If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,And speed glum heroes up the line of death.

Siegfried Sassoon

#29. Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.

Siegfried Sassoon

#30. The dead ... are more real than the living because they are complete.

Siegfried Sassoon

#31. To him, as to me, the War was inevitable and justifiable. Courage remained a virtue. And that exploitation of courage, if I may be allowed to say a thing so obvious, was the essential tragedy of the War, which, as everyone now agrees, was a crime against humanity.

Siegfried Sassoon

#32. O German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to send your son His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

Siegfried Sassoon

#33. Oh yes, I know the way to heaven was easy. We found the little kingdom of our passion that all can share who walk the road of lovers. In wild and secret happiness we stumbled; and gods and demons clamoured in our senses.

Siegfried Sassoon

#34. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers.

Siegfried Sassoon

#35. If I ever thought of myself as a man of thirty-five it was a visualization of dreary decrepitude.

Siegfried Sassoon

#36. You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go."
"The War Poems

Siegfried Sassoon

#37. In the years 1910 and 1911 I had 51 innings with 10 not outs and an average of 19. This I consider a creditable record for a poet.

Siegfried Sassoon

#38. They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy
Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all
Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky

Siegfried Sassoon

#39. We were carrying something in our heads which belonged to us alone, and to those we had left behind us in the battle.

Siegfried Sassoon

#40. His wet white face and miserable eyesBrought nurses to him more than groans and sighs:But hoarse and low and rapid rose and fellHis troubled voice: he did the business well.(First verse of Died of Wounds)

Siegfried Sassoon

#41. But I've grown thoughtful now. And you have lost Your early-morning freshness of surprise At being so utterly mine: you've learned to fear The gloomy, stricken places in my soul, And the occasional ghosts that haunt my gaze.

Siegfried Sassoon

#42. I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

Siegfried Sassoon

#43. The phrase "after-life" was also vaguely confused with going to church and not wanting to be dead - a perplexity which can be omitted from a narrative in which I am doing my best to confine myself to actual happenings. At the age of twenty-two I believed myself to be unextinguishable.

Siegfried Sassoon

#44. As regards being dead, however, one of my main consolations has always been that I have the strongest intention of being an extremely active ghost. Let nobody make any mistake about that.

Siegfried Sassoon

#45. And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

Siegfried Sassoon

#46. Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.

Siegfried Sassoon

#47. And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad
Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts
That drive them out to jabber among the trees.

Siegfried Sassoon

#48. Soldiers are dreamers.

Siegfried Sassoon