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Top Pat Barker Quotes

Browse top 32 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Pat Barker.

Favorite Pat Barker Quotes

1. "Half the world's work's done by hopeless neurotics." ~ Pat Barker
2. "The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge." ~ Pat Barker
3. "But I shot the dog myself. I took him into the barn holding on to his collar. He knew something bad was going to happen, and he rolled over on to his back and showed me his puppy-pink tummy and widdled a bit, quite certain these devices for deflecting aggression would work. I tickled him behind his ear and said, 'Sorry, old son. I'm human-we're not like that." ~ Pat Barker
4. "That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached." ~ Pat Barker
5. "When writing about historical characters I try to be as accurate as possible, and in particular not to misrepresent the view they held. With a real historical figure you have to be fair, and this is not an obligation you have in dealing with your own creations, so it is quite different." ~ Pat Barker
6. "Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars." ~ Pat Barker
7. "Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer." ~ Pat Barker
8. "'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
9. "What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do." ~ Pat Barker
10. "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
11. "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
12. "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
13. "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
14. "The sky darkened, the air grew colder, but he didn't mind. It didn't occur to him to move. This was the right place. This was where he had wanted to be." ~ Pat Barker
15. "Another person's life, observed from the outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks." ~ Pat Barker
16. "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
17. "she lived a life almost obsessively devoted to triviality. She'd turned into a pond skater, not because she didn't know what lay beneath the surface, but precisely because she did." ~ Pat Barker
18. "...the white bowl of the street began to fill with darkness, from the pavement upwards, like somebody pouring tea into a cup." ~ Pat Barker
19. "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
20. "His happiness was almost painful, like circulation returning to a dead leg." ~ Pat Barker
21. "And as soon as you accepted that the man's breakdown was a consequence of his war experience rather than his own innate weakness, then inevitably the war became the issue. And the therapy was a test, not only of the genuineness of the individual's symptoms, but also of the validity of the demands the war was making on him. Rivers had survived partly by suppressing his awareness of this. But then along came Sassoon and made the justifiability of the war a matter for constant, open debate, and that suppression was no longer possible. At times it seemed to Rivers that all his other patients were the anvil and that Sassoon was the hammer. Inevitably there were times when he resented this. As a civilian, Rivers's life had consisted of asking questions, and devising methods by which truthful answers could be obtained, but there are limits to how many fundamental questions you want to ask in a working day that starts before eight am and doesn't end till midnight." ~ Pat Barker
22. "This reinforced Rivers's view that it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neuroses and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stress in active and constructive ways. Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace." ~ Pat Barker
23. "As if you cope with loss by ingesting the dead person" ~ Pat Barker
24. "...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
25. "Colin was beginning to be afraid(...)of the future, of the possibility, suddenly glimpsed, that his life might end like this. Like most young people, he'd always assumed, without ever really thinking about it, that regret, waste, failure lay in wait for others, but not for him. Now(...)he realized, for the first time, that he was not exempt, that this, unless he took steps to avoid it, could happen to him." ~ Pat Barker
26. "(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
27. "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
28. "He's a bar-room socialist, if that's what you mean. Beer and revolution go in, piss come out" ~ Pat Barker
29. "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
30. "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
31. "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
32. "Sad but true that nothing puts a woman in her place more effectively than a chivalrous gesture performed in a certain manner." ~ Pat Barker

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Today's Quote

He had to say; words were a lens to focus one's mind, and he could not use words for anything else tonight."
Author: Ayn Rand

What Did Pat Barker Talk About?

Per
Thin
Hen
Lit
Act
Ear
Wit
King
Ally
Con
Less
Ways
Here
Ten
Thou
Does
Room
Pen
Quite
Quit
Old
Character
Bee
Sin
Side
End
Past
Son
Hum
She
Body
Bar
Tie
Tan
Simply
Line
Hey
Self
Patient
Characters
Place
Saying
Fiction
List
Dark
Rent
Deal
Seem
Turn
Almost

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