Quotes from Siegfried Sassoon

The dead...are more real than the living because they are complete.

In me the tiger sniffs the rose. Look in my heart, kind friends, and tremble, Since there your elements assemble.

I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.

Before the Battle: Music of whispering trees Hushed by the broad-winged breeze Where shaken water gleams; And evening radiance falling With reedy bird-notes calling. O bear me safe through dark, you low-voiced streams. I have no need to pray That fear may pass away; I scorn the growl and rumble of the fight That summons me from cool Silence of marsh and pool, And yellow lilies islanded in light. O river of stars and shadows, lead me through the night.

Dark clouds are smouldering into red While down the craters morning burns. The dying soldier shifts his head To watch the glory that returns: He lifts his fingers toward the skies Where holy brightness breaks in flame; Radiance reflected in his eyes, And on his lips a whispered name.

O, but Everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

I keep such music in my brain No din this side of death can quell; Glory exulting over pain, And beauty, garlanded in hell.

Books; what a jolly company they are, Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves, Dressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green And every kind of colour. Which will you read? Come on; O do read something; they're so wise. I tell you all the wisdom of the world Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet You sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out, And listen to the silence.

All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities.

I did not dread the dark winter as people do when they have lost their youth and live alone in some great city.

I have always been considerably addicted to my own company.

And my last words shall be these – that it is only from the inmost silences of the heart that we know the world for what it is, and ourselves for what the world has made us.

They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky

His wet white face and miserable eyes Brought nurses to him more than groans and sighs: But hoarse and low and rapid rose and fell His troubled voice: he did the business well. (First verse of Died of Wounds)

Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.

Soldiers are dreamers.

An innocent youth wrote recently that he is convinced I am the greatest writer in the world (from New Zealand). A touching letter – so simple & unaffected. Another young man wrote, only yesterday, that I am to him what Hardy must have been to me. Such tributes are worth having, aren't they, even if I don't deserve them.

In 1917 I was only beginning to learn that life, for the majority of the population, is an unlovely struggle against unfair odds, culminating in a cheap funeral.

Against the background of the War and its brutal stupidity those men had stood glorified by the thing which sought to destroy them…. I

I died in hell. They called it Passchendaele.

The phrase "after-life" was also vaguely confused with going to church and not wanting to be dead - a perplexity which can be omitted from a narrative in which I am doing my best to confine myself to actual happenings. At the age of twenty-two I believed myself to be unextinguishable.

If I ever thought of myself as a man of thirty-five it was a visualization of dreary decrepitude.

One evening I asked whether he [Rivers] thought I was suffering from shell-shock. 'Certainly not,' he replied. 'What have I got then?' 'Well, you appear to be suffering from an anti-war complex.

Speak, roofless Nature, your instinctive words; And let me learn your secret from the sky, Following a flock of steadfast-journeying birds In lone remote migration beating by. December stillness, crossed by twilight roads, Teach me to travel far and bear my loads.