Quotes from Vera Brittain

Eén van de belangrijkste factoren voor geestelijke groei is immers tijd om na te denken en vrije tijd om uitdrukking te kunnen geven aan je gedachten.

To have some real work to do after more than a year of purposeless pottering was like a bracing visit to a cliff-bound coast after lethargic existence on a marshy lowland.

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

Your letter] is a morass of confusion, wordiness, overloaded sentences and strained metaphors… [The greater part of it is incomprehensible], or else it is that I have neither the time nor the patience to dig the principle sentence out of the surrounding forests of subordinate clauses." – Vera Brittain to her husband George Catlin, 1925.

Few of humanity's characteristics are more disconcerting than its ability to reduce world-events to its own level, wherever this may happen to lie.

Wisconsin was covered several inches deep in snow -- very beautiful, with light ice-floes on the lakes and rivers, and the bare trees and tall grasses like brown feathers against the snow. As the sun set it was reflected in the ice-covered lakes and the light snow -- but all the same I'm glad that most of my [lecture] tour has been in summer and autumn weather. As soon as winter comes there is an extraordinary effect of desolation in these miles upon miles of uninhabited prairies and hills.

I do not believe that a League of Nations, or a Kellog Pact, or any Disarmamnt Conference, will ever rescue our poor remnant of civilisation from the threatening forces of destruction, until we can somehow impart to the rational processes of constructive thought and experiment that element of sanctified loveliness which, like superb sunshine breaking through thunder-clouds, from time to time glorifies war.