Pat Barker Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

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 your face.

Pat Barker
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.

Pat Barker
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 where he had wanted to be.

Pat Barker
Even the living were only ghosts in the making.

Pat Barker
Poor Siegfried's rebellion hadn't counted for much, though he reminded himself that he couldn't know that. It had been a completely honest action, and such actions are seeds carried on the wind. Nobody can tell where, or in what circumstances, they will bear fruit.

Pat Barker
First-person narrators can't die, so long as we keep telling the story of our own lives we're safe. Ha bloody fucking Ha.

Pat Barker
The Somme is like the Holocaust. It revealed things about mankind that we cannot come to terms with and cannot forget. It can never become the past.
On winning the Booker Prize 1995

Pat Barker
Another person's life, observed from outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks.

Pat Barker
The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

Pat Barker
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 needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.

Pat Barker
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

Pat Barker
It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.

Pat Barker
A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.

Pat Barker
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 fit emblem for the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

Pat Barker