Quotes from Pat Barker

Silence becomes a woman.' Every woman I've ever known was brought up on that saying.

but perhaps no kindness was possible between owner and slave, only varying degrees of brutality?

We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.

The defeated go down in history and disappear, and their stories die with them.

I listened and let it soothe me, that ceaseless ebb and flow, the crash of the breaking waves, the grating sigh of its retreat. It was like lying on the chest of somebody who loves you, somebody you know you can trust—though the sea loves nobody and can never be trusted. I was immediately aware of a new desire, to be part of it, to dissolve into it: the sea that feels nothing and can never be hurt.

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.

The way I see it, when you put the uniform on, in effect you sign a contract. And you don't back out of a contract merely because you've changed your mind. You can still speak up for your principles, you can still argue against the ones you're being made to fight for, but in the end you do the job .

I don't think it's possible to c-call yourself a C-Christian and... and j-just leave out the awkward bits.' -Wilfred Owen

They were men, and free. I was a woman, and a slave. And that's a chasm no amount of sentimental chit-chat about shared imprisonment should be allowed to obscure.

So many pebbles on that beach—millions—all of them worn smooth by the sea's relentless grinding, but not this one. This one had stayed sharp.

Murder is only killing in the wrong place.

His idea of female beauty was a woman so fat if you slapped her backside in the morning she'd still be jiggling when you got back home for dinner.

We're going to survive—our songs, our stories. They'll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We'll be in their dreams—and in their worst nightmares too.