Best 55 quotes of Vera Brittain on MyQuotes

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.

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

Babies are a nuisance, of course. But so does everything seem to be that is worth while – husbands and books and committees and being loved and everything. We have to choose between barren ease and rich unrest – or rather, one does not choose.

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.

College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation

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.

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

few things are more rewarding than a child's open uncalculating devotion.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 of musterd gas - the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great musterd coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying their throats are closing and they know they will choke.

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

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

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.

most of us have to be self-righteous before we can be righteous.

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.

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Venice is all sea and sculpture.

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

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.

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.

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!

For me, as for all the world, the War was a tragedy and a vast stupidity, a waste of youth and of time; it betrayed my faith, mocked my love, and irremediably spoilt my career.

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.

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.

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

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.

...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.

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.

I had realized that it was not the courage and generosity of the dead which had brought about this chaos of disaster, but the failure of courage and generosity on the part of the survivors… Perhaps, after all, the best that we who were left could do was to refuse to forget, and to teach our successors what we remembered, in the hope that they, when their own day came, would have more power to change the state of the world than this bankrupt, shattered nation. If only, somehow, the nobility which in us had been turned toward destruction could be used in them for creation, if the courage which we had dedicated to war could be employed, by them, on behalf of peace, then the future might indeed see the redemption of man instead of his further descent into chaos.

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.

I know that these things will never come back. I may see the rocks again, and smell the flowers, and watch the dawn sunshine chase the shadows from the old sulphuric-colored walls, but the light that sprang from the heightened consciousness of wartime, the glory seen by the enraptured ingenious eyes of twenty-two, will be upon them no more. I am a girl no longer, and the world, for all its excitements of chosen work and individualistic play, has grown tame in comparison with Malta during those years of our anguish. 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 unresolved. 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.

I was no longer capable of either enthusiasm or fear. Once an ecstatic idealist […], I had now passed - like the rest of my contemporaries who had survived thus far - into a permanent state of numb disillusion. Whatever part of my brief adulthood I chose to look back upon — the restless pre-War months at home, the naïve activities of a college student, the tutelage to horror and death as a V.A.D. nurse, the ever-deepening night of fear and suspense and agony in a provincial town, in a university city, in London, in the Mediterranean, in France — it all seemed to have meant one thing, and one thing only, ‘a striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing.’ Now there were no more disasters to dread and no friends left to wait for; with the ending of apprehension had come a deep, nullifying blankness, a sense of walking in a thick mist which hid all sights and muffled all sounds. I had no further experience to gain from the War; nothing remained except to endure it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.