Regeneration Quotes
"I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers."
"I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust."
"I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed."
"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."
"The horrors he’d experienced, only partially repressed even by day, returned with redoubled force to haunt the nights, giving rise to that most characteristic symptom of war neurosis: the battle nightmare."
"The typical patient, arriving at Craiglockhart, had usually been devoting considerable energy to the task of forgetting whatever traumatic events had precipitated his neurosis."
"There’s nothing more despicable than using a man’s private life to discredit his views."
"I think perhaps there’s something he’s afraid to talk about, so he solves the problem by making it impossible for himself to speak."
"Time enough to do summat for the Empire when the Empire’s done summat for you."
"He’s ambitious, you know, you mightn’t think it to look at him, but he is."
"You’ve got to toughen ’em up, you know, in our neighbourhood."
"I’m not proud. He should’ve stuck with his own."
"I can truthfully say he never sat an exam without he was bad with his asthma."
"You know sometimes I think the less you do for them, the better you’re thought of."
"You have to ride round and round this bloody ring with your hands clasped behind your head."
"It doesn’t matter what they’re about. Bring them anyway."
"No, I don’t want him back. I don’t want him back on leave. I don’t want him back when it’s over."
"You want to stop talking about it, and go and do it."
"Lying two months on your belly in a hospital bed with Requiescat in Pace stuck up your arse."
"Paralysis is no use to a coward, Mr Willard. A coward needs his legs."
"He picks up something I said at lunchtime about not being able to imagine the future."
"That habit of Siegfried’s of looking back, the inability to envisage any kind of future, seemed to be getting worse."
"Putting those forces together and getting him back to France was a task of approximately the same order of difficulty as flicking a stag beetle on to its back."
"There’s never going to be a convenient time, is there?"
"Others managed. Rivers left Anderson to get dressed and went back to his own room to finish shaving."
"He tries to behave as if we’re equal. But in the end he’s a Gold Medallist of the Royal Society, and I left Cambridge without taking a degree."
"He’s dragging out the weeks in this dreary job waiting for his turn to go out."
"But Eddie had missed the point. Hunting had always been serious. Every bit as serious as war."
"I thought all the dashing around was to keep your mind off it?"
"There’s a point beyond which you can’t press the meaninglessness."
"I’d really like to go out and run about in it."
"You mean you know and you’re not going to tell me?"
"You want perception, you go to a novelist, not a psychiatrist."
"No man likes to think he’s sliding in on another man’s leavings."
"You’d be closer to your family, your friends, your research contacts, you’d be able to get back to Cambridge at weekends."
"‘It’s an interesting atmosphere,’ Head said."
"I don’t know about isolated. I never have a minute to myself."
"‘The sea’s been known to pay visits,’ Burns said."
"‘I think we can do without this now,’ Rivers said."
"But in present circumstances, recovery meant the resumption of activities that were not merely self-destructive but positively suicidal."
"I lay back and I closed my eyes and I felt as if a ton weight had been lifted."
"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."
"A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance."
"The sheer extent of the mess seemed to be forcing him into conflict with the authorities over a very wide range of issues… medical, military. Whatever."
"He who has been through so many battles should have a better control of himself."
"The obvious candidate was a composite figure, part Callan, part Prior, the combination suggested by his application of a teaspoon to Prior’s throat and Yealland’s application of an electrode to Callan’s."
"Perhaps the rebellion of the old might count for rather more than the rebellion of the young."