Quotes About The Somme

#1. In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

Robert Hughes

#2. The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

George Will

#3. I must return to my old comrades of the Great War - to the brown, the treeless, the flat and grave-set plain of Flanders - to the rolling, heat-miraged downlands of the Somme - for I am dead with them, and they live in me again.

Henry Williamson

#4. 'Into the Blizzard' follows the author as he traces the footsteps of the Newfoundland Regiment during the First World War: where they trained in Scotland, where they fought in Gallipoli and where they died at the Battle of the Somme in France.

Michael Winter

#5. In fact, if anybody on the Somme battlefield is overdue to be treated with a little pathos it is not the attackers, with their threefold artillery superiority, total control of the air and copious reserves of of manpower, but rather the German defenders opposite.

Alexander Watson

#6. More than two hundred Aberowen men were killed on the first day of July, there on the banks of the Somme River. I have been told that the total of British casualties is over fifty thousand!

Ken Follett

#7. I sometimes compare press officers to riflemen on the Somme
mowing down wave upon wave of distortion, taking out rank upon rank of supposition, deduction and gossip.

Bernard Ingham

#8. Of the 664 men who rode into the Valley of Death about 540 eventually got out of it again. By far the highest casualty rate was among the horses. Compared with the Somme or an evening in the Blitz, the Valley of Death was a piece of cake.

Simon Heffer

#9. In a Republican district I was a Republican. In a Democratic district I was a Democrat. And in a doubtful district, I was Doubtful. But I was always for Erie.

Jay Gould

#10. In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died. There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.

Robert Fisk

#11. I think that sometimes only comedians can reach the peaks of tragedy.

Roberto Benigni

#12. Because Garden cannot survive one-nineteenth slave and eighteen-nineteenths free. A house divided against itself cannot stand!

Orson Scott Card

#13. She didn't want to let go of him, or the baby, but sometimes life made you give up what you loved most.

Danielle Steel

#14. [On the] question of why we might want to look at images even more than the real thing: I think there is some quality when you look at an image of, not only seeing this thing, whether it's the horse or the sky, but you are seeing somebody point at it and say, Look!

Rebecca Solnit

#15. If we would talk less and pray more about them, things would be better than they are in the world: at least, we should be better enabled to bear them.

John Owen

#16. They say
All is well
In the world of sickness
But we know
All is sick
In the world of wellness

Robert Black

#17. To think without saying is to hold an armed grenade without throwing it.

Francisco Parra

#18. Bold Lover, never, never canst Thou kiss, Though winning near the goalyet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though Thou hast not Thy bliss, Forever wilt Thou love, and she be fair

John Keats