Quotes from Pat Barker

He didn't like the way the gown fastened at the back. He didn't mind displaying his wares, if he liked the other person and the time seemed right, but he did like the illusion at least that the act was voluntary.

What you're saying is, OK the war isn't being fought for the reasons we're told but it is being fought for a reason. It's not benefiting the people it's supposed to be benefiting but it is benefiting somebody. And I don't believe that, you see. I think things are actually much worse than you think because there isn't any kind of rational justification left. It's become a self-perpetuating system. Nobody benefits. Nobody's in control. Nobody knows how to stop.

But it's not very likely, is it, that any movement towards greater tolerance would persist in wartime? After all, in war, you've got this enormous emphasis on love between men - comradeship - and everybody approves. But at the same time there's always this little niggle of anxiety. Is it right kind of love? Well, one of the ways you make sure it's the right kind is to make it crystal clear what the penalties for the other kind are.

Now, he can see what he's been trying to do: to bargain with grief. Behind all this frenetic activity there's been the hope that if he keeps his promises there'll be no more pain. But he's beginning to understand that grief doesn't strike bargains. There's no way of avoiding the agony – or even of getting through it faster. It's got him in its claws and it won't let go till he's learnt every lesson it has to teach

Must be quite nice, really. A foot on each side of the fence. Long as you don't mind what it's doing to your balls.

Half the world's work is done by hopeless neurotics

Perhaps pain, even other people's pain, becomes a smell you carry round with you? A

Ik wachtte tot Hekabe zou spreken, maar ze zei niets. Misschien dat ze, oog in oog met dit uitzicht, woorden zo'n gedevalueerd ruilmiddel vond dat ze het als verloren moeite beschouwde ze nog te gebruiken.

He remembered the feel of No Man's Land, the vast, unimaginable space. By day, seen through a periscope, this immensity shrank to a small, pock-marked stretch of ground, snarled with wire. You never got used to the discrepancy. Part of its power to compel the imagination lay precisely in that. It was the difference between seeing a mouth ulcer and probing it with your tongue.

Shotfarfet.

He paused. Then added with great emphasis: You must speak, but I shall not listen to anything you have to say.

Nothing justifies this. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing

In the face of their suffering, isn't it self-indulgent to think about his own feelings? He has nobody to talk to about such things and blunders his way through as best he can. If you feel nothing—this is what he comes back to time and time again—you might just as well be a machine, and machines aren't very good at caring for people.

And I realize there's another group of words that still mean something. Little words that trip through sentences unregarded: us, them, we, they, here, there. These are the words of power, and long after we're gone, they'll lie about in the language, like the unexploded grenades in these fields, and anyone of them'll take your hand off.

If he'd learned nothing else at the Slade he'd learned that men and women could be friends, even intimate friends, without sex intruding.

Grief doesn't strike bargains.

We howled, all of us, for the loss of our homeland - for the loss of our fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, for everybody we'd ever loved. For all the men carried away on that blood-dark tide.

People believed that whenever Helen cut a thread in her wool, a man died on the battlefield.

Many of the girls were crying again; I wondered how many of them had been promised in marriage to young men whose bodies now lay rotting inside the walls of Troy.

Silence becomes a woman…

We have to die, we don't have to worship it.

Gradually the looting stopped - there was nothing left to take - and the drinking began in earnest. Several huge vats were wheeled into the square and jugs passed from man to man…and then they turned their attention to us.

no girl ever dressed more carefully for her wedding day than Achilles for the battlefield…

At the time, he was probably the most beautiful man alive, as he was certainly the most violent, but that's the problem. How do you separate a tiger's beauty from its ferocity? Or a cheetah's elegance from the speed of its attack? Achilles was like that - the beauty and the terror were two sides of a single coin.