Quotes by Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“Tired as I was of conflict, I felt that I must not shrink from the fight, nor abandon in cowardice the attempt to prove, as no theories could ever satisfactorily prove without examples, that marria...”

“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”

“Perhaps ... To R.A.L.Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,And I shall see that still the skies are blue,And feel one more I do not live in vain,Although bereft of you.Perhaps the golden meadow...”

“Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of...”

“When the sound of victorious guns burst over London at 11 a.m. on November 11th, 1918, the men and women who looked incredulously into each other's faces did not cry jubilantly: " We've won the war...”

“It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist's real problem--a problem still incompletely imagined...”

“When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.”

“I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new begi...”

“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”

“That's the worst of sorrow . . . 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 o...”

“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 th...”

“I am less blindly confident than I once was, for I have been learning a truer estimate of myself, my failings and limitations, in these dark days. I have learnt to hope that if there be a Judgment ...”

“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--...”

“When I was a girl . . . I imagined that life was individual, one's own affair; that the events happening in the world outside were important enough in their own way, but were personally quite irrel...”