Vera Brittain Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

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

Vera Brittain
The pacifist's task today is to find a method of helping and healing which provides a revolutionary constructive substitute for war.

Vera Brittain
I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading.

Vera Brittain
Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Vera Brittain
I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.

Vera Brittain
Babies are a nuisance, of course. But so does everything seem to be that is worthwhile - husbands and books and committees and being loved and everything. We have to choose between ease and rich unrest.

Vera Brittain
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.

Vera Brittain
For a woman as for a man, marriage might enormously help or devastatingly hinder the growth of her power to contribute something impersonally valuable to the community in which she lived, but it was not that power, and could not be regarded as an end in itself. Nor, even, were children ends in themselves; it was useless to go on producing human beings merely in order that they, in their sequence, might produce others, and never turn from this business of continuous procreation to the accomplishment of some definite and lasting piece of work.

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 set-back insuperable?

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

Vera Brittain
Few things are more rewarding than a child's open uncalculating devotion.

Vera Brittain
I don't think victory over death... is anything so superficial as a person fulfilling their normal span of life. It can be twofold; a victory over death by the man who faces it for himself without fear, and a victory by those who, loving him, know that death is but a little thing compared with the fact that he lived and was the kind of person he was.

Vera Brittain
Belated maternity has had its compensations; small children have a habit of conferring persistent youth upon their parents, and by their eager vitality postpone the unenterprising cautions and timidities of middle age.

Vera Brittain
The idea that it is necessary to go to a university in order to become a successful writer, or even a man or woman of letters (which is by no means the same thing), is one of those fantasies that surround authorship.

Vera Brittain
We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence.

Vera Brittain
I can think of few important movements for reform in which success was won by any method other than that of an energetic minority presenting the indifferent majority with a fait accompli, which was then accepted.

Vera Brittain
So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion.

Vera Brittain
The joys of motherhood are not excessively apparent during the first few weeks of a baby's life.

Vera Brittain
All that a pacifist can undertake—but it is a very great deal—is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.

Vera Brittain
Definite gifts render their possessors capable of overcoming any obstacle this side of death; they create an impetus of far more genuine value than external advantages in some other career where the impulse to make use of them remains weak or non-existent. The work that one enjoys is the greatest source of happiness and vitality in life.

Vera Brittain
The tragedy of journalism lies in its impermanence; the very topicality which gives it brilliance condemns it to an early death. Too often it is a process of flinging bright balloons in the path of the hurricane, a casting of priceless petals upon the rushing surface of a stream.

Vera Brittain
Most of us have to be self-righteous before we can be righteous.

Vera Brittain
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.

Vera Brittain
An author who waits for the right 'mood' will soon find that 'moods' get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether.

Vera Brittain
It never seems to occur to anybody that some women may not want to find husbands.

Vera Brittain
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.

Vera Brittain
The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet's eyes.

Vera Brittain