Vera Brittain Quotes

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

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

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Venice is all sea and sculpture.

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

College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation

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

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

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.