Pat Barker Quotes

18 quotes in 343 categories

• 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…
• Murder is only killing in the wrong place.
• The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.
• 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…
• A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.
• The result was I went nowhere.
• Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars,
• 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…
• Looking straight at the world is part of your duty as a writer.
• 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…
• Another person's life, observed from the outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks.
• It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.
• 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
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• When writing about historical characters I try to be as accurate as possible, and in particular not to misrepresent the view they held. With a…
• What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.

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