Pat Barker famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Another person's life, observed from the outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks.
-- Pat Barker

#Shapes #Definitions #Persons
It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.
-- Pat Barker

#Pain #Empathy #Goes On
Looking straight at the world is part of your duty as a writer.
-- Pat Barker

#World #Duty
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.
-- Pat Barker

#Butterfly #Cutting #Soul
Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars,
-- Pat Barker

#War #World #Firsts
The result was I went nowhere.
-- Pat Barker

#Results
A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.
-- Pat Barker

#Young #Allegiance #Deserve
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.
-- Pat Barker

#Thinking #Want #Faces
The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.
-- Pat Barker

#Memories #Past #Accumulation
Murder is only killing in the wrong place.
-- Pat Barker

#Murder #Killing
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.
-- Pat Barker

#Jobs #Fighting #Mind
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.
-- Pat Barker

#Jobs #Mean #Thinking
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
-- Pat Barker

#Running #War #Believe
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.
-- Pat Barker

#Moving #Sky #Air
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
-- Pat Barker

#Christian #Thinking #Awkward
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.
-- Pat Barker

#Hate #Character #Fiction

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