82 Quotes by Vera Brittain

"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?"

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation"

"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."

"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."

"Most men, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war."