74 Quotes by Siegfried Sassoon

The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.

I have always been considerably addicted to my own company.

I didn't want to die - not before I'd finished reading The Return of the Native anyhow.

Mute in that golden silence hung with green,Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyesRemembrance of all beauty that has been,And stillness from the pools of Paradise.

Speak, roofless Nature, your instinctive words;And let me learn your secret from the sky,Following a flock of steadfast-journeying birdsIn lone remote migration beating by.December stillness, crossed by twilight roads,Teach me to travel far and bear my loads.

I did not dread the dark winter as people do when they have lost their youth and live alone in some great city.

The phrase "after-life" was also vaguely confused with going to church and not wanting to be dead - a perplexity which can be omitted from a narrative in which I am doing my best to confine myself to actual happenings. At the age of twenty-two I believed myself to be unextinguishable.

All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go." "The War Poems