Pat Barker Quotes

The white bowl of the street began to fill with darkness, from the pavement upwards, like somebody pouring tea into a cup. ~ Pat Barker

As later Priam comes secretly to the enemy camp to plead with Achilles for the return of his son Hector's body, he says: "'I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son."
Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: "And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers. ~ Pat Barker

Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough's army, than to think they'd been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice, saying; 'Run along, little man, be glad you've survived ~ Pat Barker

You should go tho the past, looking not for messages or warnings, but simply to be humbled by the weight of human experience that has preceded the brief flicker of your own few days. ~ Pat Barker

[...] but perhaps no kindness was possible between owner and slave, only varying degrees of brutality? ~ Pat Barker

In some ways the experience of these young men paralleled the experience of the very old. They looked back on intense memories and felt lonely because there was nobody left alive who'd been there. ~ Pat Barker

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

The result was I went nowhere. ~ Pat Barker

Half the world's work is done by hopeless neurotics. ~ Pat Barker

When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper. ~ Pat Barker

In his experience, premonitions of disaster were almost invariably proved false, and the road to Calvary entered on with the very lightest of hearts. MR ~ Pat Barker

Fear, tenderness - these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man. ~ Pat Barker

This is what free people never understand. A slave isn't a person who's being treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in anybody else's. ~ Pat Barker

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

And the Great Adventure - the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys - consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had hardly known. No wonder they broke down. ~ Pat Barker

What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do. ~ Pat Barker

One began by finding mental illness mystifying, and ended by being still more mystified by health. ~ Pat Barker

His idea of female beauty was a woman so fat if you slapped her backside in the morning she'd still be jiggling when you got back home for dinner. ~ Pat Barker

A hundred years from now they'll still be ploughing up skulls. And I seemed to be in that time and looking back. I think I saw our ghosts. ~ Pat Barker

As if you cope with loss by ingesting the dead person ~ Pat Barker

(In response to 'In the end moral and political truths have to proved on the body.[ ie put one's body on the line to prove a truth]
That's a very dangerous idea. It comes quite close to saying that the willingness to suffer proves the rightness of belief. But is doesn't. The most it can ever prove is the believer's sincerity. And not always that. some people just like suffering. ~ Pat Barker

The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle. In her novel "Regeneration," Pat Barker writes of a doctor who "knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. 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 of the human soul, for those whose cat of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay." But the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is "psyche," the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Half the world's work's done by hopeless neurotics. ~ Pat Barker

I do miss you so much, but it gets harder and harder to keep you in my mind. You re like a ghost almost, fading in the light of dawn. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to summon up your face and I cant see you anymore. Then at other times I hear your voice so clearly I turn round expecting to see you standing there, and every time it happens there's the same pang of loss. Cant you send me a sketch of where you are? It would help me a lot if I could picture you somewhere definite, not just have letters dropping in from outer space. Paul ~ Pat Barker

Grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced. ~ Pat Barker

A flicker of fear, but it faded. The man looked round the room again, as if searching for something, but for something inside himself, Colin thought. For something he ought to feel, and couldn't. ~ Pat Barker

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

On the face of it he seemed to be congratulating himself on dealing with patients more humanely than Yealland, but then why the mood of self-accusation? In the dream he stood in Yealland's place. The dream seemed to be saying, in dream language, don't flatter yourself. There is no distinction. ~ Pat Barker

In her world, men loved women as the fox loves the hare. And women loved men as the tapeworm loves the gut. ~ Pat Barker Regeneration

[...]somehow when you live with somebody, when you see them every day, you don't notice that they've changed. People who hardly know them at all see the change in them before you do. ~ Pat Barker

In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. 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 of 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. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Looking straight at the world is part of your duty as a writer. ~ Pat Barker

I didn't belong to the sort of family where the children's classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on. ~ Pat Barker

Didn't you find it all ... rather unsatisfying?"
"Yes, but I couldn't seem to see a way out. It was like being three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways."
A slight smile. "The result was I went nowhere. ~ Pat Barker

The military authorities say uniforms must be preserved at all costs, but that means manhandling patients who are in agony. Cut them off, says Sister Byrd, and she's the voice of authority here, in the Salle d'Attente, not some gold-braid-encrusted crustacean miles away from blood and pain, so cut they do, snip, snip, snip, snip, as close to the skin as they dare. ~ Pat Barker

They were men, and free. I was a woman, and a slave. And that's a chasm no amount of sentimental chit-chat about shared imprisonment should be allowed to obscure. ~ Pat Barker

Silence becomes a woman.' Every woman I've ever known was brought up on that saying. ~ Pat Barker

I thought: Suppose, suppose just once, once, all these centuries, the slippery gods keep their word and Achilles is granted eternal glory in return for his early death under the walls of Troy...? What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won't want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won't want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they'll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were. ~ Pat Barker

Men carve meaning into women's faces; messages addressed to other men. ~ Pat Barker

'Undertones of War' by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book. ~ Pat Barker

The silence deepened, like a fall of snow, accumulating second by second, flake by flake, each flake by itself inconsiderable, until everything is transformed. ~ Pat Barker

Rachel, who before her marriage had been a promising pianist, and now sat with the baby on her knee, picking out nursery tunes with one finger. Nev said it wouldn't be like that, and she believed him - or at least she believed he meant it - but it would, because marriage changed everything. It had its own logic, its own laws, and they were independent of the desires and intentions of those who entered into it. She felt a moment's pleasure in the cynicism of this perception, though God knows it was depressing enough. ~ Pat Barker

Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making. You learned to ration your commitment to them. This moment in this tent already had the quality of remembered experience. Or perhaps he was simply getting old. But then, after all, in trench time he was old. A generation lasted six months, less than that on the Somme, barely twelve weeks. ~ Pat Barker

Sad but true that nothing puts a woman in her place more effectively than a chivalrous gesture performed in a certain manner. ~ Pat Barker

Elinor retreated to the terrace where the night air on her skin felt like a hot bath. She was hurt, it had been such an onslaught. All the things she'd achieved in the past four years, the independent life she'd built for herself, seemed to count for nothing here. The only thing that mattered to her mother was finding a husband. As for painting, well, nice little hobby, very suitable, but you won't have much time for that when the children arrive. ~ Pat Barker

Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer. ~ Pat Barker

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

Murder is only killing in the wrong place. ~ Pat Barker

We're going to survive–our songs, our stories. They'll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We'll be in their dreams–and in their worst nightmares too. ~ Pat Barker

How do you separate a tiger's beauty from its ferocity? Or a cheetah's elegance from the speed of its attack? Achilles was like that -- the beauty and the terror were two sides of a single coin. ~ Pat Barker

The road was clogged with limbers and motor vehicles and men marching towards the front. They look like a machine: all the boots moving as one, shoulders bristling with rifles, arms swinging, everything pointing forwards. And on the other side of the road, men stumbling back, trying to keep time, half dead from exhaustion and with this incredible stench hanging over them. You get whiffs of it when you cut the clothes off wounded men, but out there, in the mass, it's as solid as a wall. And they all look so gray, faces twitching, young men who've been turned into old men. It's a great contrast, stark and terrible, because they're the same men, really. It's an irrigation system, full buckets going one way, empty buckets the other. Only it's not water the buckets carry. ~ Pat Barker

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

Would you really have married the man who'd killed your brothers?

Well, first of all, I wouldn't have been given a choice. But yes, probably. Yes. I was a slave, and a slave will do anything, anything at all, to stop being a thing and become a person again.

I just don't know how you could do that.

Well, no, of course you don't. You've never been a slave. ~ Pat Barker

From then on the improvement was dramatic, though still the conversations with the dead friend continued, until one morning he awoke crying, and realized he was crying, not only for his own loss but also for his friend's, for the unloved years. ~ 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 know what I am, but I wouldn't want a faith that couldn't handle facts. ~ Pat Barker

I wasn't thinking of a sequel when I finished 'Life Class.' What changed my mind was the perception that the characters had a lot of life left in them, a lot of unresolved conflicts, and also I became interested in the Tonks pastel portraits of facially disfigured soldiers and in the whole area of facial reconstruction. ~ Pat Barker

It was ... the Great White God de-throned, I suppose. Because we did, we quite unselfconsciously assumed we were the measure of all things. That was how we approached them. And suddenly I saw that we weren't the measure of all things, but that there was no measure. ~ Pat Barker

Lying between the sheets, she felt different; her body had turned into bread dough, dough that's been kneaded and pounded till it's grey, lumpen, no yeast in it, no lightness, no prospect of rising. Her arms lay stiff by her sides. When, finally, she drifted off to sleep, she dreamt she was on her knees in a corner of the room, trying to vomit without attracting the attention of the person who was asleep on the bed. Her eyes wide open in the darkness, she tried to cast off the dream, but it stayed with her till morning. ~ Pat Barker

I had him in my cab once.

Who? Neville asked

Rupert Brooke. He was good, him. "There's some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England".

That would be the bit with my nose under it; just fucking drive, will you? ~ Pat Barker

A gang of teenage boys had gathered on the steps of the Odeon. Boys Collin knew, from the fourth and fifth year, boys with braying laughs and sudden, falsetto giggles, boys who stood on street corners and watched girls walk past, who punched each other with painful tenderness, who cultivated small moustaches that broke down, when shaved, into crusts of acne thicker than the moustaches had ever been, who lit cigarettes behind cupped hands, narrowing their eyes in pretended indifference to the smoke. ~ Pat Barker

I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age - 11 or 12 - but I don't think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn't good enough! ~ Pat Barker

If your parents disapprove of you and are cunning with their disapproval, there will never come a new dawn when you can become convinced of your own value. There is no fixing a damaged childhood. The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float. ~ Pat Conroy

But can't you even imagine what it must feel like to have a true home? I don't mean heaven. I mean a real earthly home. Not some fortress you bought and built up and have to keep everybody locked in or out. A real home. Not some place you went to and invaded and slaughtered people to get. Not some place you claimed, snatched because you got the guns. Not some place you stole from the people living there, but your own home, where if you go back past your great-great-grandparents, past theirs, and theirs, past the whole of Western history, past the beginning of organized knowledge, past pyramids and poison bows, on back to when rain was new, before plants forgot they could sing and birds thought they were fish, back when God said Good! Good!-- there, right there where you know your own people were born and lived and died. Imagine that, Pat. That place. Who was God talking to if not to my people living in my home?"
"You preaching, Reverend."
"No, I'm talking to you, Pat. I'm talking to you. ~ Toni Morrison

Whatever it is out there, is better equipped than you are. It can see better and hear better and smell better. All you're got on it is brains. Your only chance of getting it is ~ Pat Frank

But as his years advanced Lewis had seen less and less purpose in distinguishing between fact and fiction. ~ Clive Barker

Rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

My uncle was 16, in junior high, and he heard me singing and snatched me off the stage. I thought he was happy and was going to pat me on the head and say I was good. But he took me home and told my grandmother this youngin' was at school singing the blues. ~ Mavis Staples

Darkness always had its part to play. Without it, how would we know when we walked in the light? It's only when its ambitions become too grandiose that it must be opposed, disciplined, sometimes - if necessary - brought down for a time. Then it will rise again, as it must. ~ Clive Barker

Studies have shown that the terms girl and lady have pejorative connotations: They conjure images of someone weaker and lazier; someone more nervous, afraid, dependent, immature, and inconsiderate; someone less sexy, intelligent, and certainly less charismatic than 'woman.' Indeed, the term woman is overwhelmingly interpreted as more favorable and is most often used to describe adult females who deserve respect. ~ Pat Heim

I was always willing to take a great deal of the burden of getting along in life on my own shoulders, but I wasn't willing to give myself a pat on the back. I was always looking to somebody else to give me that.. That was all wrong. ~ Raquel Welch

Opening her eyes again, and seeing her husband's face across the table, she leaned forward to give it a pat on the cheek, and sat down to supper, declaring it to be the best face in the world. ~ Charles Dickens

I learned this one growing up in Texas and, subsequently, living in Los Angeles: always use the 'usted' form when speaking to a Spanish official. Mexican border patrol cops don't like it when you call them 'amigo,' give them a hardy pat on the back, slip a $20 in their pocket. No bueno, it doesn't fly. By the way, those of you not laughing at that obviously took French in high school, and that was a gay choice. ~ Iliza Shlesinger

Well, just to dispel all the myths, Walt [Disney] was not anti-Semitic. He was not racist in any way, shape, or form. He was not frozen when his life ended. He's not in some frozen vault right now waiting to make a big comeback. ~ Pat Williams

If you get tough mentally, you can get tough physically and overcome fatigue. ~ Pat Riley

The music acted as a marinade in my weary spirit. ~ Pat Conroy

If you keep telling a youngster he is no good, he might begin to doubt himself. A pat on the back could bring the very best out of him. ~ Harbhajan Singh

I say, when you tell the truth, you never offend nobody, particularly if you do it with dignity. ~ Pat Cooper

Believe me. Sometimes when life looks to be at its grimmest, there's a light hidden at the heart of things.
Clive Barker, Abarat ~ Cornelia Funke

I don't want money. What the hell's money good for? You can't drive it and you can't eat it and it won't even fix a flat. ~ Pat Frank

We need to continue our full support of the nascent Iraqi government by helping to rebuild their economic infrastructure and maintain security while training the Iraqi security forces. ~ Pat Roberts

I know there are some Christians who believe that war and their participation in it are morally wrong. While I respect their views and must allow them to follow their consciences, I do not believe the Bible teaches pacifism. ~ Pat Robertson

Somewhere inside, we hear a voice. It leads us in the direction of the person we wish to become. But it is up to us whether or not to follow. ~ Pat Tillman

Be strong, little mother," she said to Melissa. "I know you can be." "Yes?" Melissa said a little doubtfully. ~ Clive Barker

Security for agriculture merits serious concern by not only the agricultural community but our nation as a whole. The risk to the U.S. food supply and overall economy is real. ~ Pat Roberts

Watch for the high tides of yourself and flow up with them; when the inevitable low tides come, either rest or meditate. You cannot escape rhythm. You transcend it by working with it. ~ Elsa Barker

I strongly urge you to consciously consider what success means to you. Instead of allowing others or society to determine when you win, you determine it. ~ Pat Heim

Our minds are the most mysterious things about us. ~ Elsa Barker

I believe that if you go on a date and get to second base and then you go home alone and rub one out, that's like runs batted in. ~ Arj Barker

I don't care what it is you're doing; if you're not laughing, you're not doing it right. ~ Donna Barker

I need you, Pat Peoples; I need you so fucking bad. ~ Matthew Quick

Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right. ~ John McCain

Jon gave Simon a patronizing pat on the shoulder. "I'm going to miss your witty repartee this summer, Lewis."
"I'm going to hope you get eaten by a spider demon this summer, Cartwright."
George slipped an arm around both of them, grinning maniacally and humming "Can You Feel the Love Tonight? ~ Cassandra Clare

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters. ~ Pat Conroy

I've just come back from Mississippi and over there when you talk about the West Bank they think you mean Arkansas. ~ Pat Buchanan

Someone who knew me when I was 14 said I was the oldest 14-year-old on the planet. Now I'm a 14-year-old who is 60. ~ Pat Metheny

I'm obsessed with my children. ~ Travis Barker

Spoken names should be banned. Rose looked like Ross, Matt looked like Pat, Ian looked like nothing at all. Everyone should have a sign name. ~ Emma Viskic

Chad seemed both venomous and insecure, a flammable combination. ~ Pat Conroy

Generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers. ~ Pat Conroy