I look up and down the dormitory and there’s hardly a sound except for pages being turned, and here and there a pen scratching. It’s like this every evening. And not just letters either. Diaries. Poems. At least two would-be poets in this hut alone. Why? you have to ask yourself. I think it’s a way of claiming immunity. 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.
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The Ghost Road, Pat Barker. (via birdcage)
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‘Look,’ Prior said, with the air of one attempting to engage the village idiot in rational discourse, ‘you know as well as I do that that…’ He flung himself back in his chair. ‘I’m not going to do this, I just refuse.’
Rivers waited.
Still not looking at him, Prior said, or rather chanted, ‘I have certain impulses which I do not give way to except in strict moderation and at the other person’s request. At least, in this state I don’t. I’m simply pointing out that in the the the the other state I might not be so fucking scrupulous.’
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Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door (via pasiphile)
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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.
‘I did have one,’ she said. ‘Loos.’ Odd, he thought, getting up to the bar to buy more drinks, that one word should be enough. But then why not? Language ran out on you, in the end, the names were left to say it all. Mons, Loos, Ypres, the Somme. Arras.
There’s nothing more that he wanted to say, that he could say.
There’s nothing more despicable than using a man’s private life to discredit his views
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Pat Barker, Regeneration
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The fact that you admire somebody very much doesn’t automatically mean they’re a good model. I mean, I admire Wilde, but if I started trying to be witty and elegant and incisive, I’d probably fall flat on my face.
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Siegfried Sassoon, in Pat Barker’s Regeneration
Pretty good advice, although I’m wondering how much of this is Barker speaking for herself, because her style is pretty much the polar opposite of elegant (but still really really good, of course).
(via pasiphile)
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