Pat Barker > Quotes

“It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.”
― Pat Barker

“We’re going to survive–our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams–and in their worst nightmares too.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles … How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“I thought: Suppose, suppose just once, once, all these centuries, the slippery gods keep their word and Achilles is granted eternal glory in return for his early death under the walls of Troy...? What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won't want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won't want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they'll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Men carve meaning into women’s faces; messages addressed to other men.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“As later Priam comes secretly to the enemy camp to plead with Achilles for the return of his son Hector's body, he says: "'I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son."
Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: "And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“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, Regeneration

“Yes, the death of young men in battle is a tragedy - I’d lost four brothers, I didn’t need anybody to tell me that. A tragedy worthy of any number of laments - but theirs is not the worst fate. I looked at Andromache, who’d have to live the rest of her amputated life as a slave, and I thought: We need a new song. ”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“This is what free people never understand. A slave isn't a person who's being treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in anybody else's.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.”
― Pat Barker, Regeneration

“How do you separate a tiger's beauty from its ferocity? Or a cheetah's elegance from the speed of its attack? Achilles was like that -- the beauty and the terror were two sides of a single coin.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“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.”
― Pat Barker, Regeneration

“Silence becomes a woman.' Every woman I’ve ever known was brought up on that saying.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“The defeated go down in history and disappear, and their stories die with them.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Somehow if she'd know the worst parts, she couldn't have gone on being a haven for him...Men said they didn't tell their women about France because they didn't want to worry them. but it was more than that. He needed her ignorance to hide in. Yet, at the same time, he wanted to know and be known as deeply as possible. And the two desires were irreconcilable.”
― Pat Barker, Regeneration

“Another person's life, observed from the outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks.”
― Pat Barker

“[...] but perhaps no kindness was possible between owner and slave, only varying degrees of brutality?”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“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, The Ghost Road

“I listened and let it soothe me, that ceaseless ebb and flow, the crash of the breaking waves, the grating sigh of its retreat. It was like lying on the chest of somebody who loves you, somebody you know you can trust—though the sea loves nobody and can never be trusted. I was immediately aware of a new desire, to be part of it, to dissolve into it: the sea that feels nothing and can never be hurt.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“So many pebbles on that beach—millions—all of them worn smooth by the sea’s relentless grinding, but not this one. This one had stayed sharp.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“The way I see it, when you put the uniform on, in effect you sign a contract. And you don't back out of a contract merely because you've changed your mind. You can still speak up for your principles, you can still argue against the ones you're being made to fight for, but in the end you do the job.”
― Pat Barker, Regeneration

“he’s beginning to understand that grief doesn’t strike bargains. There’s no way of avoiding the agony—or even of getting through it faster. It’s got him in its claws and it won’t let go till he’s learnt every lesson it has to teach.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“His idea of female beauty was a woman so fat if you slapped her backside in the morning she'd still be jiggling when you got back home for dinner.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“I don't think it's possible to c-call yourself a C-Christian and... and j-just leave out the awkward bits.' -Wilfred Owen”
― Pat Barker, Regeneration

“They were men, and free. I was a woman, and a slave. And that’s a chasm no amount of sentimental chit-chat about shared imprisonment should be allowed to obscure.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Murder is only killing in the wrong place.”
― Pat Barker, The Ghost Road

“We’re going to survive—our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams—and in their worst nightmares too.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“He shook his head. “It won’t always be like this.” “Oh, I think it might.” “No—honestly it won’t. Things do change. And if they don’t you bloody well make them.” “Spoken like a man.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“All Achilles’s emotions seemed to be varying shades of anger.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls