Vera Brittain Quotes
-
I don't think victory over death... is anything so superficial as a person fulfilling their normal span of life. It can be twofold; a victory over death by the man who faces it for himself without fear, and a victory by those who, loving him, know that death is but a little thing compared with the fact that he lived and was the kind of person he was.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I thought that spring must last forevermore, For I was young and loved, and it was May.
-
Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.
-
Meek wifehood is no part of my profession; I am your friend, but never your possession.
-
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.
-
College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation.
-
The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.
-
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.
-
...few things are more rewarding than a child's open uncalculating devotion.
-
I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy war and the orators who talk so much about going on, no matter how long the war lasts and what it may mean, could see a case of musterd gas - the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great musterd coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying their throats are closing and they know they will choke.
-
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.
-
It never seems to occur to anybody that some women may not want to find husbands.
-
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.
-
We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence.
-
Why, I wonder, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, and 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?
-
Definite gifts render their possessors capable of overcoming any obstacle this side of death; they create an impetus of far more genuine value than external advantages in some other career where the impulse to make use of them remains weak or non-existent. The work that one enjoys is the greatest source of happiness and vitality in life.
-
An author who waits for the right 'mood' will soon find that 'moods' get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether.
-
I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Few of humanity's characteristics are more disconcerting than its ability to reduce world-events to its own level, wherever this may happen to be.
-
The joys of motherhood are not excessively apparent during the first few weeks of a baby's life.