98 Quotes by Pat Barker

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

Two miles up the road to hell. No point blaming those women because they couldn’t imagine it. He could hardly realize it himself, sitting there by the window, stirring his coffee, bubbling with excitement about his room, the work he intended to do there, and the new idea that was beginning to take root in his mind.

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.

I don’t think he was ashamed of anything those hands had done – proud of it, in fact – but all the same they were a problem, because they shaped other people’s perceptions of him in ways he couldn’t control.

Silence becomes a woman.′ Every woman I’ve ever known was brought up on that saying.

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

This is what free people never understand. A slave isn’t a person who’s being treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in anybody else’s.

Men carve meaning into women’s faces; messages addressed to other men.

Fear, tenderness – these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man.