Vera Brittain famous quotes

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

#Peace #War #Healing

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

#Rewards #Abiding #May

College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation
-- Vera Brittain

#College

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

#Baby #Husband #Children

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

#Successful #Ideas #Order

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

#Children #Men #Order

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

#Men #Thinking #Victory

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

#Friends #Children #Parent

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

#Baby #Motherhood #Joy

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

#Children #Devotion

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

#Party #Book #People

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

#Lying #Rushing #Giving

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

#Children #Parent #Age

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.
-- Vera Brittain

#Humanity #World #Levels

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

#Eye #Poet #Prose

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

#Husband #Want #May

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

#Spring #Lasts #May

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

#War #Modern #Civilisation

Why, I wonder, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, and 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

#Honesty #People #Sorrow

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.
-- Vera Brittain

#War #Writing #Mean

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.
-- Vera Brittain

#Expression #Political #Immaturity

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

#Easter #Wind #Oxford

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

#Break Up #Husband #Reading

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

#Thinking #Important #Reform

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

#Attitude #Lying #Men

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

#Meek #Possession #Profession

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

#Mercy #Providence #Should

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

#Work #Passion #Careers

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

#Venice #Sea #Sculpture

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

#Waiting #Mood

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

#Character #Interesting #People

So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion.
-- Vera Brittain

#Art #Writing #People

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

#Peace #Hate #Order

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

#Self #Self Righteous #Righteous