Siegfried Sassoon Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or 'Home, sweet Home',—
And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

Siegfried Sassoon
The song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Siegfried Sassoon
What voice revisits me this night? What face
To my heart's room returns?
From the perpetual silence where the grace
Of human sainthood burns
Hastes he once more to harmonise and heal?
I know not. Only I feel
His influence undiminished
And his life's work, in me and many, unfinished.

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

Siegfried Sassoon
O German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to send your son His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

Siegfried Sassoon
How innocent were these Trees, that in
Mist-green May, blown by a prospering breeze,
Stood garlanded and gay;
Who now in sundown glow
Of serious colour clad confront me with their show
As though resigned and sad,
Trees, who unwhispering stand umber, bronze, gold;
Pavilioning the land for one grown tired and old;
Elm, chestnut, aspen and pine, I am merged in you,
Who tell once more in tones of time,
Your foliaged farewell.

Siegfried Sassoon
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line of death.

Siegfried Sassoon
You are too young to fall asleep for ever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.

Siegfried Sassoon
Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride
'Their name liveth for evermore' the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

Siegfried Sassoon
But the past is just the same, – and War's a bloody game...
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.

Siegfried Sassoon
Who's this—alone with stone and sky? It's only my old dog and I— It's only him; it's only me; Alone with stone and grass and tree. What share we most—we two together? Smells, and awareness of the weather. What is it makes us more than dust? My trust in him; in me his trust.

Siegfried Sassoon
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.

Siegfried Sassoon
I remember another evening (it was the last one I spent in that place) when the weather seemed awaiting some spectacular event in this world of blundering warfare. Or was it as though the desolation of numberless deaths had halted the clouded sky to an attitude of brooding inertia?

Siegfried Sassoon
At the risk of being thought squeamish or even unsoldierly, I still maintain that an ordinary human being has a right to be momentarily horrified by a mangled body seen on an afternoon walk, although people with sound common sense can always refute me by saying that life is full of gruesome sights and violent catastrophes.

Siegfried Sassoon
In 1917 I was only beginning to learn that life, for the majority of the population, is an unlovely struggle against unfair odds, culminating in a cheap funeral.

Siegfried Sassoon