Quotes from Vera Brittain

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Meek wifehood is no part of my profession; I am your friend, but never your possession.

I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading.

College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation

The joys of motherhood are not excessively apparent during the first few weeks of a baby's life.

I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.

There is an abiding beauty which may be appreciated by those who will see things as they are and who will ask for no reward except to see.

It never seems to occur to anybody that some women may not want to find husbands.

However deep our devotion may be to parents or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire.

The pacifist's task today is to find a method of helping and healing which provides a revolutionary constructive substitute for war.

Modern war and modern civilisation are utterly incompatible...one or the other must go.

It is probably true to say that the largest scope for change still lies in men's attitude to women, and in women's attitude to themselves.

So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion.

I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading.

There is an abiding beauty which may be appreciated by those who will see things as they are and who will ask for no reward except to see.

There seemed to be nothing left in the world, for I felt that Roland had taken with him all my future and Edward all my past.

If this word should turn out to be a 'Te moriturum saluto,' perhaps it will brighten the dark moments a little to think how you have meant to someone more than anything ever has or ever will. What you have striven for will not end in nothing, all that you have done and been will not be wasted, for it will be a part of me as long as I live, and I shall remember, always.

How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die

Like no one else... you share that part of my mind that associates itself mostly with ideal things and places... The impression thinking about you gives me is very closely linked with that given me by a lonely hillside or a sunny afternoon... or books that have meant more to me than I can explain... This is grand, but still it isn't enough for this world... The earthly and obvious part of me longs to see and touch you and realise you as tangible.

There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think--which is fundamentally a moral problem--must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process.

Politics is the executive expression of human immaturity.

It is quite impossible to understand,' I commented afterwards, 'how we can be such strong individualists, so insistent on the rights and claims of every human soul, and yet at the same time countenance (and if we are English, even take quite calmly) this wholesale murder, which if it were applied to animals or birds or indeed anything except men would fill us with a sickness and repulsion greater than we could endure.

Could I write an autobiographical novel, I wonder? Can one make a book out of the very essence of one's self? Perhaps so, if one was left with one's gift stripped bare of all that made it worth having, and nothing else was left...

Why, I wondered, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth--that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent and every setback insuperable?