Quotes from Pat Barker

There'll be no end, then, to his story - because that's it, that's the bargain, that's what the tricky gods have promised him: everlasting glory in return for an early death under the walls of Troy.

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

It's the hardest thing in the world to continue to be aware of someone else's pain.

From then on the improvement was dramatic, though still the conversations with the dead friend continued, until one morning he awoke crying, and realized he was crying, not only for his own loss but also for his friend's, for the unloved years.

Rivers thought how misleading it was to say that the war had 'matured' these young men. It wasn't true of his patients, and it certainly wasn't true of Burns, in whom a prematurely aged man and a fossilized schoolboy seemed to exist side by side. It did give him a curiously ageless quality, but 'maturity' was hardly the word.

And then I looked at him, at this man who in a previous life I might have liked or even loved—and watched him turn to stone.

Elinor retreated to the terrace where the night air on her skin felt like a hot bath. She was hurt, it had been such an onslaught. All the things she'd achieved in the past four years, the independent life she'd built for herself, seemed to count for nothing here. The only thing that mattered to her mother was finding a husband. As for painting, well, nice little hobby, very suitable, but you won't have much time for that when the children arrive.

privacy sacrificed without intimacy being gained.

Suicides were rare now. The war had cheered everybody up.

Half the world's work is done by hopeless neurotics.

I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age - 11 or 12 - but I don't think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn't good enough!

What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.

It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.

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

Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles … How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him 'the butcher'.

Men carve meaning into women's faces; messages addressed to other men.

Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough's army, than to think they'd been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice, saying; 'Run along, little man, be glad you've survived

Yes, the death of young men in battle is a tragedy - I'd lost four brothers, I didn't need anybody to tell me that. A tragedy worthy of any number of laments - but theirs is not the worst fate. I looked at Andromache, who'd have to live the rest of her amputated life as a slave, and I thought: We need a new song.

You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.

A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.

Somehow if she'd know the worst parts, she couldn't have gone on being a haven for him...Men said they didn't tell their women about France because they didn't want to worry them. but it was more than that. He needed her ignorance to hide in. Yet, at the same time, he wanted to know and be known as deeply as possible. And the two desires were irreconcilable.

Another person's life, observed from the outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks.

This is what free people never understand. A slave isn't a person who's being treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in anybody else's.

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.