Vera Brittain - Testament of Youth (1933)

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

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

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
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
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
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
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