VERA BRITTAIN

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

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.

There is an abiding beauty which may be appreciated by those who will see things as they are and who will ask for no reward except to see.

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

It is probably true to say that the largest scope for changes still lies in men's attitude to women, and in women's attitude to themselves

Daily Herald this morning described burning Berlin on Saturday night as having looked “like an oven”. I wonder who really gets the satisfaction out of this terrible deterioration in human values.

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

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

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.

I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy war and the orators who talk so much about going on, no matter how long the war lasts and what it may mean, could see a case of musterd gas - the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great musterd coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying their throats are closing and they know they will choke.

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.

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.

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

few things are more rewarding than a child's open uncalculating devotion.

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?

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.

Venice is all sea and sculpture.

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.

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.

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

College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation

Babies are a nuisance, of course. But so does everything seem to be that is worth while – husbands and books and committees and being loved and everything. We have to choose between barren ease and rich unrest – or rather, one does not choose.

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

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.

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.