Brittain Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Few things are more rewarding than a child's open uncalculating devotion. — Vera Brittain

[I] wondered if he was looking up at that same moon, far away, and thinking of me as I was thinking of him. — Vera Brittain

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. — Vera Brittain

Most men, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war. — Vera Brittain

He was, I told myself, a unique experience in my existence; I never think definitely of him as man or boy, as older or younger, taller or shorter than I am, but always of him as a mind in tune with mine, in which many of the notes are quite different from mine but are all in the same key. — Vera Brittain

Goes to war, still encourages the production of unwanted C3 children by exhausted mothers, and still compels married partners who hate one another to live together in the name of morality. — Vera Brittain

Her mind was like a spring-tide in full flood; rich, shining, vigorous, and capable of infinite variety. — Vera Brittain

We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence. — Vera Brittain

What I hope we can learn is to be aware of how our beliefs color what we see. I wanted to tell Brittain that Lemry was trying — Chris Crutcher

An author who waits for the right 'mood' will soon find that 'moods' get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether. — Vera Brittain

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. — Vera Brittain

You can't expect men to appreciate you. Sometimes they will, sometimes they won't. Even women won't always appreciate what you do, so why should the men understand you any better? The only person who will always know what you did, and why you did it, is yourself. If you try to do what's right, that should be enough. Remind yourself of that when it seems as if it isn't. — C. Dale Brittain

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. — Vera Brittain

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. — Vera Brittain

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 my own youth by the war. — Vera Brittain

Belated maternity has had its compensations; small children have a habit of conferring persistent youth upon their parents, and by their eager vitality postpone the unenterprising cautions and timidities of middle age. — Vera Brittain

The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet's eyes. — Vera Brittain

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. — Vera Brittain

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

I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain . — George Packer

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 — Vera Brittain

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

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 — Vera Brittain

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 and still quite unsolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o'-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts, no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality. — Vera Brittain

Politics is the executive expression of human immaturity. — Vera Brittain

It is impossible," I concluded, "to find any satisfaction in the thought of 25,000 slaughtered Germans, left to mutilation and decay; the destruction of men as though beasts, whether they be English, French, German or anything else, seems a crime to the whole march of civilization. — Vera Brittain

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 Day of some kind, God will not see us with our own eyes, nor judge us as we judge ourselves. — Vera Brittain

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

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 marriage and motherhood need never tame the mind, nor swamp and undermine ability and training, nor trammel and domesticise political perception and social judgement. Today, as never before, it was urgent for individual women to show that life was enriched, mentally and spiritually as well as physically and socially, by marriage and children; that these experiences rendered the woman who accepted them the more and not the less able to take the world's pulse, to estimate its tendencies, to play some definite, hard-headed, hard-working part in furthering the constructive ends of a political civilisation — Vera Brittain

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! " They only said: " The War is over. — Vera Brittain

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 meadows at my feet,
Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay,
And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet,
Though You have passed away.
Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,
And crimson roses once again be fair,
And autumn harvest fields a rich delight,
Although You are not there.
But though kind Time may many joys renew,
There is one greatest joy I shall not know
Again, because my heart for loss of You
Was broken, long ago. — Vera Brittain

Definite gifts render their possessors capable of overcoming any obstacle this side of death; they create an impetus of far more genuine value than external advantages in some other career where the impulse to make use of them remains weak or non-existent. The work that one enjoys is the greatest source of happiness and vitality in life. — Vera Brittain

It was all too much. I went to bed for three days, sick like an Austen or a Bronte character who'd foolishly wandered the moors in a storm, with a strong will but weak ankles. Only the moors were my mom's past, and I couldn't find my way. — Heather Brittain Bergstrom

It seems delightfully incongruous,' he wrote from Armentie'res, 'that there should be good shops and fine buildings and comfortable beds less than half an hour's walk from the trenches — Vera Brittain

It is always so strange that when you are working you never think of all the inspiring thoughts that made you take up the work in the first instance. Before I was in hospital at all I thought that because I suffered myself I should feel it a grand thing to relieve the sufferings of other people. But now, when I am actually doing something which I know relieves someone's pain, it is nothing but a matter of business. I may think lofty thoughts about the whole thing before or after but never at the time. At least, almost never. Sometimes some quite little thing makes me stop short all of a sudden and I feel a fierce desire to cry in the middle of whatever it is I am doing. — Vera Brittain

Four impressionable years spent in a number of very different hospitals convinced me once for all that nursing, if it is to be done efficiently, requires, more than any other occupation, abundant leisure in colorful surroundings, sufficient money to spend on amusements, agreeable food to re-establish the energy expended, and the removal of anxiety about illness and old age; yet of all skilled professions, it is still the least vitalised by these advantages, still the most oppressed by unnecessary worries, cruelties, hardships and regulations. — Vera Brittain

At college, more than anywhere else, one was likely to make the friendships that supported one through life. — Vera Brittain

College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation — Vera Brittain

When you are a soldier you are one of two things, either at the front or behind the lines. If you are behind the lines you need not worry. If you are at the front you are one of two things. You are either in a danger zone or in a zone which is not dangerous. If you are in a zone which is not dangerous you need not worry. If you are in a danger zone you are one of two things; either you are wounded or you are not. If you are not wounded you need not worry. If you are wounded you are one of two things, either
seriously wounded or slightly wounded. If you are
slightly wounded you need not worry. If you are
seriously wounded one of two things is certain -
either you get well or you die. If you get well you
needn't worry. If you die you cannot worry, so there is no need to worry about anything at all. — Vera Brittain

I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy War, and the orators who talk so much about going on no matter how long the War lasts and what it may mean, could see a case
to say nothing of 10 cases
of mustard gas in its early stages
could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes
sometimes temporally, sometimes permanently
all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke. — Vera Brittain

I thought that spring must last forevermore, For I was young and loved, and it was May. — Vera Brittain

The fact that, within ten years, I lost one world, and after a time rose again, as it were, from spiritual death to find another, seems to me one of the strongest arguments against suicide that life can provide. There may not be - I believe that there is not - resurrection after death, but nothing could prove more conclusively than my own brief but eventful history the fact that resurrection is possible within our limited span of earthly time. — Vera Brittain

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 beginning. — Vera Brittain

You know you wouldn't be happy unless you married an odd sort of person — Vera Brittain

I can think of few important movements for reform in which success was won by any method other than that of an energetic minority presenting the indifferent majority with a fait accompli, which was then accepted. — Vera Brittain

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. — Vera Brittain

The tragedy of journalism lies in its impermanence; the very topicality which gives it brilliance condemns it to an early death. Too often it is a process of flinging bright balloons in the path of the hurricane, a casting of priceless petals upon the rushing surface of a stream. — Vera Brittain

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

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 one--and that means more isolation and still more sorrow. — Vera Brittain

At sixteen, he was inclined to be rather priggish and self-righteous. Not such bad qualities in adolescence after all, since most of us have to be self-righteous before we can be righteous. — Vera Brittain

Babies are a nuisance, of course. But so does everything seem to be that is worthwhile - husbands and books and committees and being loved and everything. We have to choose between ease and rich unrest. — Vera Brittain

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. — Vera Brittain

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. — Vera Brittain

I don't think victory over death ... is anything so superficial as a person fulfilling their normal span of life. It can be twofold; a victory over death by the man who faces it for himself without fear, and a victory by those who, loving him, know that death is but a little thing compared with the fact that he lived and was the kind of person he was. — Vera Brittain

Between 1914 and 1919 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually re-dedicating themselves - as I did that morning in Boulogne - to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal. — Vera Brittain

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 ... — Vera Brittain

A number of neurotic ancestors, combined with with persistent, unresolved terrors of childhood, had deprived me of the comfortable gift of natural courage. — Vera Brittain

If the would-be writer studies people in their everyday lives and discovers how to make his characters in their quieter moods interesting to his readers, he will have learned far more than he can ever learn from the constant presentation of crises. — Vera Brittain

Mother says that people like me just become intellectual old maids,' I told him.
'I don't see why,' he protested.
'Oh, well, it's probably true!' I said, rather sharply, for misery had as usual made me irritable. 'After the War there'll be no one for me to marry.'
'Not even me?' he asked very softly.
'How do I know I shall want to marry you when that time comes?'
'You know you wouldn't be happy unless you married an odd sort of person.'
'That rather narrows the field of choice, doesn't it?'
'Well
do you need it to be so very wide? — Vera Brittain

There is a strange lack of dignity in conquest; the dull, uncomplaining endurance of defeat appears more worthy of congratulation. — Vera Brittain

She seemed to have waited so long to hear those words that for a moment the earth stood still, and the moon, the trees, the grotesque shadows across the heath, became in that instant transfixed in her memory. How shall I bear this exquisite happiness? It is too much: it will destroy me. — Vera Brittain

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

Which women would no longer be the second-rate, unimportant creatures that they were now considered, but the equal and respected companions of men. Indeed, that school garden, now trimly beautiful in its twenty-year-old mellowness, but then recently hewn from the rough surface of the Downs and golden-hedged with tangled gorse and broom, has been for me somehow associated with every past phase of life. There, at the age of sixteen, I first began to dream how the men and women of my generation - with myself, of course, conspicuous among that galaxy of Leonardos - would inaugurate a new Renaissance on a colossal scale, and incidentally redeem all the foolish mistakes of our forefathers. — Vera Brittain

Edward was always a good listener, since his own form of self-expression then consisted in making uneartly and to me quite meaningless sounds on his small violin. I remember him, at the age of seven, as a rather solemn, brown-eyed little boy, with beautiful arched eyebrows which lately, to my infinite satisfaction, have begun to reproduce themselves, a pair of delicate question-marks, above the dark eyes of my five-year-old son. Even in childhood we seldom quarrelled, and by the time that we both went away to boarding-school he had already become the dearest companion of thos brief years of unshadowed adolescence permitted to our condemned generation. — Vera Brittain

Venice is all sea and sculpture ... — Vera Brittain

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. — Vera Brittain

The idea that it is necessary to go to a university in order to become a successful writer ... is one of those fantasies that surround authorship. — Vera Brittain

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. — Vera Brittain

Whichever way I went, there would be sadness and a sense of loss. Was this a part of growing up - the agony of making such choices?
If so, I wanted to stay a child forever.

- Ian Carras — Bill Brittain

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. — Vera Brittain

For a woman as for a man, marriage might enormously help or devastatingly hinder the growth of her power to contribute something impersonally valuable to the community in which she lived, but it was not that power, and could not be regarded as an end in itself. Nor, even, were children ends in themselves; it was useless to go on producing human beings merely in order that they, in their sequence, might produce others, and never turn from this business of continuous procreation to the accomplishment of some definite and lasting piece of work. — Vera Brittain

But this is so no longer, and never will be again, since man's inventions have eliminated so much 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. — Vera Brittain

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. — Vera Brittain

All that a pacifist can undertake
but it is a very great deal
is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate. — Vera Brittain

Nevertheless, hateful as saying 'No' always is to an imaginative person, and certain as the offence may be that it will cause to individuals whose own work does not require isolated effort, the writer who is engaged on a book must learn to say it. He must say it consistently to all interrupters; to the numerous callers and correspondents who want him to speak, open bazaars, see them for 'only' ten minutes, attend literary parties, put people up, or read, correct and find publishers for semi-literate manuscripts by his personal friends. — Vera Brittain