V.M. Yeates > Quotes

“Grab is barbarous, and we are breeding barbarians by frightening people with poverty and insecurity and treating education as a training to compete instead of to live.”
― V.M. Yeates, Winged Victory

“Tom thought sometimes that it was even more heroic, being a coward, to follow a hero into his scrapes than to be the hero. Heroes followed their temperaments; cowards sometimes overcame theirs.”
― V.M. Yeates, Winged Victory

“He was back among them, though not, thank God, forced to hide in the earth from their terror, and now they were a multitude so clamorous-powerful, that men were pismires to them. The earth was theirs; they ploughed it, they manured it with the flesh and watered it with the blood of their slaves; and all that came of their husbandry was a stink.”
― V.M. Yeates, Winged Victory

“For millions of years had summer heat burdened the skies with this empty grandeur, nature's dream-world, only significant by its utter non-significance. At length human purpose had penetrated these eagle-baffling heights, the purpose of murder. Dominant, triumphant, intelligent murderousness had driven man to scale these airy precipices and rend grandeur's garment of silence with the terrible staccato voices of his machine guns and the idiot bark of exploding shells. The maniac clangour of war echoed through the broad halls of the winds; terror and brutality ranged the inviolable heavens; iron laughter shook the vault of sky and obscured the path-ways to the stars.

The contagion of man's evil vilified the clean high air; fear drove its invisible chariot among the clouds, leaving a spiritual miasma that choked the mind: fear, most anti-human of passions. It yellowed the sky's clarity and magnified the stridor of war into a mind-dinning yell of malice. There was a harsh rhythm of iron wheels in the stultified brain, echoing and clanging among metallic clouds; the sky had turned to brass.”
― V.M. Yeates, Winged Victory

“​That was the worst of being in the flying service: you were always in the front line, even in England.”
― V.M. Yeates, Winged Victory