Best 27 quotes of Pat Barker on MyQuotes

Pat Barker

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    Pat Barker

    A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.

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    Pat Barker

    Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.

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    Pat Barker

    Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem for the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

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    Pat Barker

    Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer. What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.

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    Pat Barker

    Half the world's work is done by hopeless neurotics.

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    Pat Barker

    I don't think it's possible to c-call yourself a C-Christian and... and j-just leave out the awkward bits.' -Wilfred Owen

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    Pat Barker

    Murder is only killing in the wrong place.

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    Pat Barker

    Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough's army, than to think they'd been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice, saying; 'Run along, little man, be glad you've survived

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    Pat Barker

    The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

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    Pat Barker

    The sky darkened, the air grew colder, but he didn't mind. It didn't occur to him to move. This was the right place. This was where he had wanted to be.

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    Pat Barker

    The way I see it, when you put the uniform on, in effect you sign a contract. And you don't back out of a contract merely because you've changed your mind. You can still speak up for your principles, you can still argue against the ones you're being made to fight for, but in the end you do the job.

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    Pat Barker

    We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.

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    Pat Barker

    You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.

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    Pat Barker

    And the Great Adventure - the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys - consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had hardly known. No wonder they broke down.

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    Pat Barker

    A woman, not a thing. Wasn't that a prize worth risking everything for, however short a time I might have to enjoy it?

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    Pat Barker

    Didn’t you find it all … rather unsatisfying?” “Yes, but I couldn’t seem to see a way out. It was like being three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways.” A slight smile. “The result was I went nowhere.

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    Pat Barker

    Elinor retreated to the terrace where the night air on her skin felt like a hot bath. She was hurt, it had been such an onslaught. All the things she'd achieved in the past four years, the independent life she'd built for herself, seemed to count for nothing here. The only thing that mattered to her mother was finding a husband. As for painting, well, nice little hobby, very suitable, but you won't have much time for that when the children arrive.

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    Pat Barker

    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.

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    Pat Barker

    Grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.

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    Pat Barker

    He remembered the feel of No Man's Land, the vast, unimaginable space. By day, seen through a periscope, this immensity shrank to a small, pock-marked stretch of ground, snarled with wire. You never got used to the discrepancy. Part of its power to compel the imagination lay precisely in that. It was the difference between seeing a mouth ulcer and probing it with your tongue.

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    Pat Barker

    I don't know what I am, but I wouldn't want a faith that couldn't handle facts.

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    Pat Barker

    I had him in my cab once. Who? Neville asked Rupert Brooke. He was good, him. "There's some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England". That would be the bit with my nose under it; just fucking drive, will you?

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    Pat Barker

    I thought: And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brother.

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    Pat Barker

    Sometimes at night I lie awake and quarrel with the voices in my head.

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    Pat Barker

    There were several paintings to admire, one of them very fine indeed. Many were urban, industrial landscapes. Paul was generous with his praise, though inwardly discouraged. In comparison with this his own work was immature, and he couldn't understand why. He wasn't particularly young for his age. His mother's long illness and early death had forced him to grow up and take on responsibility. So this maturity of vision in a man whom he found distinctly childish in many respects bewildered him. Living at home, spoiled, self-pitying, moaning on because his mother didn't pay him enough attention - for God's sake! The work and the man seemed to bear no relation to each other. And the contrast was all the more painful because Neville was painting the landscape of Paul's childhood.

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    Pat Barker

    They were men, and free. I was a woman, and a slave. And that’s a chasm no amount of sentimental chit-chat about shared imprisonment should be allowed to obscure.

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    Pat Barker

    We’re going to survive–our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams–and in their worst nightmares too.