Alice Winn > Quotes

“I’m sorry. This is not what I intended to say. What I meant to say is this: You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“My dearest, darling Sidney,' There was nothing else. Only dead white paper, blank and meaningless. A comma, followed by nothing. Death summed up by grammar.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Ellwood smiled, and a sudden, dry bleakness spread over Gaunt’s heart as he thought of Hercules, and Hector, and all the heroes in myth who found happiness briefly, only for it not to be the end of the story.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Gaunt was woven into everything he read, saw, wrote, did, dreamt. Every poem had been written about him, every song composed for him, and Ellwood could not scrape his mind clear of him no matter how he tried.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“It was the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children. It was treading over the corpses of your friends so that you might be killed yourself. It was the congealed evil of a century.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Call me Sidney,” said Ellwood.
“Sidney,” said Gaunt, so quickly, as if he had been waiting years to say it ... He pressed their foreheads together. “This means I’m keeping you,” he added, his voice fierce with warning.
As if it wasn’t exactly what Ellwood wanted to hear.
“You can have me,” he told Gaunt, and suddenly he couldn’t breathe.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Poor Elly, he thought, as he fell. It’s so much harder to be left behind.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“It was much easier to be brave for your friends than for yourself.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“He thought perhaps all the pain would sour the love, but instead it drew him further in, as if he were Marc Antony, falling on his own sword. And it was a magical thing, to love someone so much; it was a feeling so strange
and slippery, like a sheath of fabric cut from the sky.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Henry,' he [Ellwood] said, smoke tumbling out of his mouth in tendrils, 'are you all right?'

'I'm fine.'

'Yes, I know you're fine. But are you all right?”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“It seems unfair, doesn't it? Our parents got to live their whole lives without anything like this."

"Busily building up the world that led to this.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Do you believe in magic?” he asked. Ellwood paused for a while, so long that if he had been anyone else, Gaunt might have repeated the question.
“I believe in beauty,” said Ellwood, finally.
“Yes,” said Gaunt, fervently. “Me too.” He wondered what it was like to be someone like Ellwood, who contributed to the beauty of a place, rather than blighting it.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Where’s the rest of it?” said Ellwood, his voice rising unpredictably.
“My,” just the word “my” would have been enough to live on, if Gaunt had ever called him that to his face.
“He never called me Sidney. Not once, in five years.” He looked up at Hayes. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Hayes. He sat stiff and upright on the bed.
“Why didn’t he finish it?”
“I don’t know,” said Hayes.
“He knew he was going to die.”
“He thought you both would.”
“But he never called me Sidney.”
He never called him any of it. My, dearest, darling. Sidney. Ellwood leant back against the window, his throat stretching long as he looked up.
“If Gaunt had been a girl, I should have married him in an instant,” he said.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“We swarmed through Africa and America because we were better than they, of course we were, we were making war humane, and now it has broken down and they are dragged into hell with us. We have doomed the world with our advancements, with our democracy that is so much better than whatever they’ve thought of, with our technology that will so improve their lives, and now Algerian men must choke to death on their own melted insides in wet Belgian trenches and I—”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“He missed England as if it were a person.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Death is a debt which every one of us must pay.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Their tenderness was hesitant and temporary, like a butterfly pausing on a child’s hand.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“I've decided it doesn't matter whether you love me back," said Gaunt.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Henry? Would you have kissed me, if it hadn’t been for the War?”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“It was dusk, on a Friday. The battered skeletons of trees tapered against the fresh starlight in No Man's Land. The sky offered curious glimpses of beauty, from time to time. The men wrote about it in their letters, describing sunsets in painstaking detail to their families, as if there was nothing to see at the front but crimson clouds and dusted rays of golden light.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“And it was a magical thing, to love someone so much; it was a feeling so strange and slippery, like a sheath of fabric cut from the sky.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Gaunt paused in the doorway, a peculiar, fond smile on his lips. The same expression he used to get in school when Ellwood recited poetry to people who wished he wouldn’t; the same expression he had had on Divisional Rest in Loos, when Ellwood touched him more than was appropriate. It hadn’t ever changed. Gaunt had always looked at him like that, as if Ellwood’s flaws were qualities.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“I hear the breaking bodies scream.
Thankful I have hit my mark,
I slither through the trenching dark.
You bleed to death in all my dreams.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Only one thought can comfort, and that is that he died, not for war, but for peace.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“What a waste Sandys' last days had been, thought Gaunt. Pathetically attempting to overcome a grief that would never have time to heal.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“You’re not afraid of dying, Henry. You’re just opposed to killing. That isn’t cowardice.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“The birds chattered merrily on the wet brown branches. Daffodils sunned out among the headstones. How alive it all seemed, and how gracious-to die in an era when your death bought you a brief moment at the centre of something. To be important, rather than one of millions.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“War is…a violent teacher?”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“It was a bright blue day. The green leaves curled playfully into the sky, and daffodils burst out like exclamation points among the tombstones.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“O! Let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!
Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all,
Withhold no atom’s atom or I die!”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam