Quotes by British Authors - Page 664

People spoke in whispers, as if the war was listening
Chris Cleave
That's my secret and my shame. I'm Nona Grey, war is in my veins, and the screams of my enemies are music to me.
Mark Lawrence
Everything stinks: creosote, bleach, disinfectant, soil, blood, gangrene.The military authorities say uniforms must be preserved at all costs, but that means manhandling patients who are in agony. Cut them off, says Sister Byrd, and she's the voice of authority here, in the Salle d'Attente, not some gold-braid-encrusted crustacean miles away from blood and pain, so cut they do, snip, snip, snip, snip, as close to the skin as they dare.On either side of Paul as he cuts are two long rows of feet: yellow, strong, calloused, scarred where blisters have formed and burst repeatedly. Since August they've done a lot of marching, these feet, and all their marching has brought them to this one place.
Pat Barker
he inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn’t more or less relinquished poetry by then.
Kate Atkinson
Imagine living in a world where we no longer believe that war can lead to peace. War can't lead to peace anymore than ignorance can lead to knowledge. War leads to premature death, pain, suffering, hatred, fear and more separation.
Renée Paule
And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hidIts bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.
Wilfred Owen
To achieve peace,we needed to have a war to start with.
Anthony T.Hincks
A siege is always a hospital - a hospital where mad thoughts abound and where mad things are done; where, under the stimulus of an unnatural excitement, new beings are evolved, beings who, while having the outward shape of their former selves, and, indeed, most of the old outward characteristics, are yet reborn in some subtle way and are no longer the same....The salt of life! Is it true, or is it merely a mistake, such as life-loving man naturally makes? For it can be nothing but the salt of death which has lain for a brief instant on the tongue of every soldier - a revolting salt which the soldier refuses to swallow and only is compelled to with strange cries and demon-like mutterings. Sometimes, poor mortal, all his struggles and his oaths are in vain. The dread salt is forced down his throat and he dies. The very fortunate have only an acrid taste which defines analysis left them. Of these more fortunate there are, however, many classes. Some, because they are neurotic or have some hereditary taint, the existence of which they have never suspected, in the end succumb; others do not entirely succumb but carry traces to their graves; yet others do not appear to mind at all. It is a very subtle poison, which may lie hidden in the blood for many months and years. I believe it is a terrible thing....And yet even this nobody understands or cares to speak of... Englishmen are proud, and want to know if you were inside the British Legation, their Legation, and when they have heard yes or no their interest ceases. They little know what the Legation stood for. The Americans march up to the Tartar Wall, talk about "Uncle Sam's boys," and exclaim that it requires no guessing to tell who saved the Legations. The French are the same, so are the Germans, so even the Italians. Only the Japanese and the Russians say nothing....I am, therefore, tired of it all, inexpressibly tired. I wish to escape from my hospital, to go away to some clean land where they understand so little of such things that their indifference will in the end, perhaps, convince me and make me forget.Yet can one ever forget?
B.L. Putnam Weale
Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.
Harry Patch
I spent hours apart by myself, taking stock of where I stood, mentally, on this my thirtieth birthday. It came to me queerly how, four years ago, I had meant to be a general and knighted, when thirty. Such temporal dignities were now in my grasp, only that my sense of falsity of the Arab position had cured me of crude ambition: while it left me craving for good repute among men. This craving made me profoundly suspect my truthfulness to myself. Only too good an actor could so impress his favorable opinion. Here were the Arabs believing me, Allenby and Clayton trusting me, my bodyguard dying for me: and I began to wonder if all established reputations were founded, like mine, on fraud.
T.E. Lawrence
We grow old without knowing the reason.We build the walls for no good reason.We start the wars for lack of any reason.And we cry foul, when we all knew the real reason.Is it any wonder then, that we do the things we do.When all we have to do, which is hard for a lot of you,Is reason!
Anthony T.Hincks
I disagreed with the conduct of the war, with bombing civilians, categorizing everyone as the enemy or simply as armed men, with the racism and the disregard for those people.
Joe Glenton
People afraid of outsiders are easily manipulated. The warrior caste, supposedly society's protectors, often become protection racketeers. In times of war or crisis, power is easily stolen from the many by the few on a promise of security. The more elusive or imaginary the foe, the better for manufacturing consent. The Inquisition did a roaring trade against the Devil.
Ronald Wright
If you survive in battle, it is with Odin's grace, and if you fall, it is because he has betrayed you.
Neil Gaiman
Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom .... These are the beginnings of sorrows.
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
Smoke curls among the ruins of East London. Many of the buildings have burned to the ground or split like exploded rocks. Small lights bloom like a sea of candles. Even this rain will never put them all out.
John Owen Theobald
Nine-nine of every hundred among you probably desire peace, while the balance may hold war a condition to be preferred; but what can be the mental norm of statesmanship where such a minority conquer the peace-lovers?
Eden Phillpotts
Perhaps there is something good that had come from this war: everything has been turned around, all the unfairness made grimly plain. It has given us everyday women a voice - dared us to stand up for ourselves, and to stand up for others. We have less to lose in this world of chaos and death, after all.
Jennifer Ryan
I've got one thing to say: I killed a lot of germans, and I'm only sorry I didn't kill more.
Nancy Wake
This idea struck me: the army is the body : I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting. (15 May 1940)
Virginia Woolf
Yes, our old age is not going to be sunny orchard drowse. By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry? Why indeed? (24 December 1940)
Virginia Woolf
War! Someone's making a hell of a lot of money.
Anthony T.Hincks
And isn't love between two people better than hatred, in this world of violence and mourning? There seemed to me a fragile kindness in their love that survived through this poisonous war. Even though one of them hadn't.
Jennifer Ryan
War is a monster. War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows. And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.
Patrick Ness
I hear civilians saying we’re all heroes, heard someone… was it Arthur Godfrey on Armed Forces Radio? I can’t recall, but it’s nonsense anyway. If everyone is a hero, then no one is. Others say everyone below ground is a hero, but a lot of those were just green kids who spent an hour or a day on the battlefield before standing up when they shouldn’t have, or stepping where they shouldn’t have stepped. If there’s something heroic about stand up to scratch your ass and having some Kraut sniper ventilate your head, I guess I don’t see it. If by “hero”, you mean one of those soldiers who will follow an order to rush a Kraut machine gun or stuff a grenade in a tank hatch, well, that’s closer to meaning something. But the picture in your imagination, Gentle Reader, may not bear much similarity to reality. I knew a guy who did just that—jumped up on a Tiger tank and dropped a grenade (or was it two?) down the hatch. Blew the hell out of it too. But he’d just gotten a Dear John letter from his fiancée in the same batch of mail that informed him his brother had been killed. So I guess it was eight on the line between heroism and suicide.
Michael Grant
Now we have travelled a hundred million steps from the Datum, we are finding life systems entirely unlike our own - and yet we still find war. Must it always be so?
Terry Pratchett
The casualty of war is our disappearing humanity.
Anthony T.Hincks
We were girls, you see, not even women, just girls, most of us when we started. And the boys were just boys, not men, most of them. We’d only begun to live life, we knew little and understood less. We were unformed, incomplete. It’s funny how easy it is to see that now. If you’d called me a child three years ago when this started I’d have been furious. But looking back? We were children just getting ready to figure out what adulthood was all about.
Michael Grant
I knew the eyes. I didn’t know the Kraut, but yeah, I sure knew that look. I see it when I look in the mirror, even now. If you stay too long in the way, it’s like your eyes try to get away, like they’re sinking down, trying to hide, wary little animals crawling into the cave of your eye socket.
Michael Grant
All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them. The mighty educated States involved conceived-not without reason-that their very existence was at stake. Neither peoples nor rulers drew the line at any deed which they thought could help them win. Germany, having let Hell loose, kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed. Every outrage against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals-often of a greater scale and of longer duration. No truce or parley mitigated the strife of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered often slowly in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood of their countries. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.
Winston S. Churchill
I was not descending in a plane, coming Home. I was watching an alien world as it ascended towards me - and one that I could never begin the process of readjusting to, because I knew that I would just as soon be returning to another world, whose normality was as alien to this home as I now was.
Jake Wood
My family says they are proud of me. Of course, I would rather hear this than the contrary, but I cannot say that I am proud of myself, so I find that I cannot 'talk about it'.
Jake Wood
And now I demand that you do what the ignorant might feel is the easier thing. You must refrain from dying in battle. Revenge is not redress. Revenge is a wheel, and it turns backwards. The dead are not your masters.
Terry Pratchett
Only in war does the madman become sane.
Anthony Ryan
I've survived revolution, war, and over a decade on this continent," the Burgrave reflected. "But by all the ghosts of the hundred emperors, I think fatherhood will finally do me in.
Anthony Ryan
War is ever the folly of the ignorant. But I have seen much to convince me some wars must be fought, to the bitterest end if need be.
Anthony Ryan
No one would deny that all wars and battles are regrettable acts of human folly, causing unjustifiable agony and distress to combatants and non-combatants alike-but these considerations should not preclude their serious study, if only to avoid the mistakes of the past which make such tragedies inevitable.
David G. Chandler
The folks who hate the idea of women soldiers tell one set of lies, the people who like the notion of women at war tell a different set of lies. If you believe the one side, we’re nothing but a drag on the men, and the other side acts like we won the war all by ourselves. We could probably get a pretty good debate going here on the women’s war over the question of which se of lies we hate more—the one denies what we’ve done; the other belittles what our brother have done.
Michael Grant
There is no one who loves peace more than a soldier
Philippa Gregory
She felt the urge to tell him more, to explain about the abortions she had done after the war, and that she hadn’t realised until later, much later, that she had racked up a debt she was still struggling to repay. How could he know – he was just a soldier, he had killed as a matter of principle, but the war babies, the children of rape, had been left to junior doctors, the volunteers in ragged tents on the outskirts of town.
Tahmima Anam
They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.' He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him.
Graham Greene
So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth even starting a train of thought.
Graham Greene
You've got to cram it into your thick heads: the sickos that sent us to this place are so stuffed with hate they've got to spew it out on someone, it almost doesn't matter who. If it's not one race, face or religion it'd be another. Right now it's us they vomit on. Next war it'll be some other poor beggars, then some others, then -''I want to go home!' the poor woman gasped, in between shakes and sobs.'And I want to murder every last beast in this hellhole with my bare hands,' Girder raged. She had hands as big as dinner plates. 'The best we can do instead is live. Are you listening? The only way to beat them is by not dying. So shut up and survive, you miserable cow. And let the rest of us sleep.
Lucy Adlington
A country that publicly threatens to completely destroy another nation should not be surprised when a preemptive surprise attack occurs from that nation and their allies.
Steven Magee
The most dangerous thing to the USA population is not North Korea, it is the USA government.
Steven Magee
Someone needs to put a muzzle on President Trump sooner rather than later.
Steven Magee
I regard President Trump as an international terrorist.
Steven Magee
I decided to start a war, father", I said, cheerfully, "it's so much more interesting than peace.
Bernard Cornwell
A funeral procession, the women scream until they fall down in a faint, the men hold them up, the boys cry silently sand swear to take up arms in their father's name. It is the same funeral procession that their fathers saw, their fathers before them, and their grandfathers unto generations unknown, where the same vow was taken.
Claire North
We were going to get Ahmed back. And Rahim back. And Shazad. And Delila. And all the others who had been captured. And we were going to end this.
Alwyn Hamilton
This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation, the question hasn’t come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There’s no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there’s nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war — these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds.
Ian McEwan
Power loves not the light of day, nor the attention of curious eyes. In darkness it thrives most...A lord may send his army hither and thither, but the true testing of his power is in those places where his army is not...Has he sent its long fingers far enough through the backstreets and alleys, into the drinking dens and the lending-houses, so that he may gather them unto himself and hold them firm without a single swordsman?
Brian Ruckley
Yea ! by your works are ye justified--toil unrelieved ;Manifold labours, co-ordinate each to the sending achieved ;Discipline, not of the feet but the soul, unremitting, unfeigned ;Tortures unholy by flame and by maiming, known, faced, and disdained ; Courage that sunsOnly foolhardiness ; even by these, are ye worthy of your guns.
Gilbert Frankau
It was such a heavenly dream: dreamed between the reality of war and the reality of hereditary madness.
Jessie Douglas Kerruish
I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting (WWI) to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.
Paul Nash
War would end if the dead could return.
Stanley Baldwin
By now the crusaders had christened the most powerful French catapult 'Mal Voisine', or 'Bad Neighbour', while nicknaming the Muslim stone-thrower that targeted it for conter-bombardment 'Mal Cousine', or 'Bad Relation'.
Thomas Asbridge
In the Second World War he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak. In private conversation he was wont to say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it. Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility. The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch
Bertrand Russell
As he grew older, which was mostly in my absence, my firstborn son, Alexander, became ever more humorous and courageous. There came a time, as the confrontation with the enemies of our civilization became more acute, when he sent off various applications to enlist in the armed forces. I didn't want to be involved in this decision either way, especially since I was being regularly taunted for not having 'sent' any of my children to fight in the wars of resistance that I supported. (As if I could 'send' anybody, let alone a grown-up and tough and smart young man: what moral imbeciles the 'anti-war' people have become.)
Christopher Hitchens
Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by an invitation from Kaiser Wilhelm II to attend the annual maneuvers of the Imperial German Army, held at Breslau. The Kaiser was 'resplendent in the uniform of the White Silesian Cuirassiers' and his massed and regimented infantry...Strange to find Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath both choosing the word 'roller,' in both its juggernaut and wavelike declensions, for that scene.
Christopher Hitchens