Quotes from Pat Barker

Forget. So there was my duty laid out in front of me, as simple and clear as a bowl of water: Remember.

in my experience men are curiously blind to aggression in women. They're the warriors, with their helmets and armour, their swords and spears, and they don't seem to see our battles—or they prefer not to. Perhaps if they realized we're not the gentle creatures they take us for their own peace of mind would be disturbed?

You're a monster, do you know that?" "Yes, oddly enough, I do." He threw his arm across Patroclus's shoulders. "Come on, let's eat.

Achilles' story never ends: wherever men fight and die, you'll find Achilles.

Sometimes at night I lie awake and quarrel with the voices in my head.

No one looks him in the face now, it's as if his grief frightens them. What are they afraid of? That one day they'll have to endure pain like this? Or that they never will, that they're incapable of it, because grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.

His happiness was almost painful, like circulation returning to a dead leg.

Fathers remain opaque to their sons, he thought, largely because the sons find it so hard to believe that there's anything in the father worth seeing. Until he's dead, and it's too late. Mercifully, doctors are also opaque to their patients.

On the face of it he seemed to be congratulating himself on dealing with patients more humanely than Yealland, but then why the mood of self-accusation? In the dream he stood in Yealland's place. The dream seemed to be saying, in dream language, don't flatter yourself. There is no distinction.

A hundred years from now they'll still be ploughing up skulls. And I seemed to be in that time and looking back. I think I saw our ghosts.

As if you cope with loss by ingesting the dead person

the white bowl of the street began to fill with darkness, from the pavement upwards, like somebody pouring tea into a cup.

Would you really have married the man who'd killed your brothers? Well, first of all, I wouldn't have been given a choice. But yes, probably. Yes. I was a slave, and a slave will do anything, anything at all, to stop being a thing and become a person again. I just don't know how you could do that. Well, no, of course you don't. You've never been a slave.

But he does worry about it—in the long hours of darkness. And then, in the morning, he forgets the weakness of the night.

Nothing happened. Well, of course nothing happened! Isn't nothing what generally happens when you pray to the gods?

I don't think he was ashamed of anything those hands had done—proud of it, in fact—but all the same they were a problem, because they shaped other people's perceptions of him in ways he couldn't control.

grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.

He's not human," Ajax blurted out. "Well, of course he bloody isn't," Agamemnon said. "His mother's a fish.

They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won't want to know we were living in a rape camp.

We women are peculiar creatures. We tend not to love those who murder our families.

I will never forget that she cried for me when I was not able to cry for myself.

I don't know what I am, but I wouldn't want a faith that couldn't handle facts.

The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

In some ways the experience of these young men paralleled the experience of the very old. They looked back on intense memories and felt lonely because there was nobody left alive who'd been there.