Quotes from Vera Brittain

inventions have eliminated so much of distance and time; for better, for worse, we are now each of us part of the surge and swell of great economic and political movements, and whatever we do, as individuals or as nations, deeply affects everyone else.

I joined the Pass Mods. class and studied the cyropaedia and Livy's Wars with a resentful feeling that there was quite enough war in the world without having to read about it in Latin

People talked so foolishly, I thought, about the ennobling effects of suffering. No doubt the philosophy that tells you your soul grows through grief and sorrow is right--ultimately. But I don't think this is the case at first. At first, pain beyond a certain point merely makes you lifeless, and apathetic to everything but itself.

I had seen the poor, the meek and the modest, the young, the brave and the idealistic - all those, in fact, who always are too easily enchanted by high-sounding phrases - giving their lives and their futures in order that the powerful might have more power, the rich grow richer, the old remain in comparative security.

But I know these things will never come back,

That's the worst of sorrow," I decided, with less surprise than I had accepted the same conclusion after Roland's death. "It's always a vicious circle. It makes one tense and hard and disagreeable, and this means that one repels and antagonises people, and then they dislike and avoid one--and that means more isolation and still more sorrow.

Probably, in the unfamiliar situation, responsibility was never formally allocated to anyone by anybody, and, human nature being incurably optimistic and fundamentally hostile to assuming any work not established as its own by long tradition, each person who might have shouldered the task of organization hopefully supposed it to have been performed by one of the other.

You see, when everything else is gone, there's always work. I don't think anyone ever realises how much work can mean until the other things are gone.

Daphne tried to convey to him that the likelihood of degrees for women at Oxford was a matter for satisfaction, perhaps, but hardly for excitement or ratification. Women's accomplishments in the University had long been equal, if not superior, to men's; degrees were not a privilege, they were simply what women deserved - their due, their right. She became very animated as she argued on this topic.

But we share a memory which is worth all the rest of the world, and the sun of that memory never sets. And you know that I love you, that I would do anything in the world in my power if you should ask it, and that I am your servant as well as your brother. 'EDWARD.

At this time of the year it seems that everything ought to be creative, not destructive, and that we should encourage things to live and not die.

To extend love, to promote thought, to lighten suffering, to combat indifference, to inspire activity. To know everything of something and something of everything.

English lecturers... who treat the Americans as a race of barbarians without any history should be taken for a tour round Washington before they are permitted to speak!

I look wildly for facts and I can only find arguments.

I learnt, in those first few days, how numerous and devastating were the errors that it was possible to commit in carrying out the most ordinary functions of everyday life. To me, for whom meals had hitherto appeared as though by clockwork and the routine of a house had seemed to be worked by some invisible mechanism, the complications of sheer existence were nothing short of a revelation.

one wheat-ear of enthusiasm was worth a good many tares of indifference

if only the comfortable prosperity of the Victorian age hadn't lulled us into a false conviction of individual security and made us believe that what was going on outside our homes didn't matter to us, the Great War might never have happened.

The War has little enough to its credit, but it did break the tradition that venereal disease or sexual brutality in a husband was amply compensated by an elegant bank-balance.

People's live were entirely their own, perhaps--and more justifiably,--when the world seemed enormous, and all its comings and goings were slow and deliberate. But this is no longer, and never will be again, since man's inventions have eliminated so much of distance and time; for better, for worse, we are now each of us part of the surge and swell of great economic and political movements, and whatever we do, as individuals or as nations, deeply affects everyone else.

knowledge that men deliberately refused to perceive the obvious even when such perception was to their own advantage. Still optimistic in spite of the War, I had believed that statesmen needed only to realise the mistakes of the past in order to avoid them, only

Als je eenmaal van de bergtop omlaag hebt gekeken, is het moeilijk om tevreden in de vallei te blijven...

Ik besefte nog niet (...) dat alleen een proces van volledige aanpassing, het uitwissen van smaak, talent en zelfs herinneringen, het leven draaglijk maakte voor iemand die oog in oog stond met de allerergste aspecten van een oorlog.

Het gedreun van de kanonnen in de verte was eerder te voelen dan te horen; nu en dan trok er een rilling door de aarde, was er een vibratie die werd meegevoerd door de wind, terwijl ik op dat moment niets hoorde.

how precious individuals and places become the moment that the possibility of leaving them turns into fact.