Quotes from Pat Barker

Men experience their own ageing in the bodies of women

No likely end would bring them loss or leave them happier than before.

Two miles up the road to hell. No point blaming those women because they couldn't imagine it. He could hardly realize it himself, sitting there by the window, stirring his coffee, bubbling with excitement about his room, the work he intended to do there, and the new idea that was beginning to take root in his mind.

It's almost as if for the labouring classes, illness has to be physical. They can't take their condition seriously unless there's a physical symptom.

In his experience, premonitions of disaster were almost invariably proved false, and the road to Calvary entered on with the very lightest of hearts. MR

how often the early stages of change of cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar...the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

So Agamemnon fears the dead? Well there are plenty of them to fear - young men with all their lives ahead of them do not go down into the darkness reconciled.

his experience, premonitions of disaster were almost invariably proved false, and the road to Calvary entered on with the very

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

Fuck her standing, Fuck her lying, Cut her throat and fuck her dying, When she's dead but not forgotten Dig her up and fuck her rotten.

Grief is only as deep as the love it's replaced

I'd been kind to Ismene- or I thought I had, but perhaps no kindness was possible between owner and slave, only varying degrees of brutality?

Achilles lives in the present. He remembers the past, not without regret, but increasingly without resentment. He rarely, if ever, thinks about the future, because there is no future. It's amazing how easily he's come to accept that. His life rests like a dandelion clock on the palm of his open hand, a thing so light the merest breath of wind can carry it away.

Something else, something I couldn't put my finger on, had made me turn back. Perhaps no more than a feeling that this was my place now, that I had to make my life work here.

If any man love the instruments of any craft, the gods have called him.

Why him? Why not me? He asks the questions over and over, as if one day they might have a different answer, and the burden of guilt be lifted at last.

Zijn dood is door de goden bepaald. Nu wijst het hem elke ochtend alleen maar op de kostbaarheid van het leven dat hem binnenkort zal worden afgenomen.

But I shot the dog myself. I took him into the barn holding on to his collar. He knew something bad was going to happen, and he rolled over on to his back and showed me his puppy-pink tummy and widdled a bit, quite certain these devices for deflecting aggression would work. I tickled him behind his ear and said, 'Sorry, old son. I'm human-we're not like that.

Ik zal nooit vergeten dat zij voor me huilde toen ik dat zelf niet kon.

Sad but true that nothing puts a woman in her place more effectively than a chivalrous gesture performed in a certain manner.

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

Some MOs would send a corpse back if you propped one up in front of them, particularly now when every man was needed for the latest in a long line of 'one last pushes'.

There are no words. There are no words for what I felt when I saw the setting sun rise.

It's strange, isn't it? You go on and on, or I do rather, seeing God knows what horrors and learning not to care or anyway not to care more than you need to do the job, and then something happens that gets right under your skin.