Louisa Young > Quotes

“No one ever wins a war, and wars are never over.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“Courage for the big troubles in life, lad' he'd say, 'and patience for the small. Be of good cheer. God is awake.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“Length of service: one year or duration of war. Duration of war, of course. He didn't want to spend a whole year in the army.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“They were completely happy. They couldn't stop smiling at each other, beaming like fools till their cheeks ached.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“Papa," she said easily, happily, walking across the park with him to
the Albert Hall. "What is it like to be in love?"
"Oh, it’s marvellous," he said. "Or terrible. Or both. The Romans
saw it as a fit of madness that you wouldn’t wish on anybody. But
there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s the main thing.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“... what he could or couldn’t say to them. Everything he had to say: I love you, it’s hell, I walk on corpses and breathe death, it’s only a matter of time before I prove a coward, and I don’t want to be a coward, but I don’t understand, either I kill people, or I’m a coward, that’s the choice, someone somewhere set it up and I get no vote, I can’t say, ‘I don’t accept that’ – and I have accepted it, for a year I’ve accepted it, this is the situation but I don’t understand how I got here, how it is just going on and on, and nobody mentions it, and if you don’t like it they think you’re mad, and you get shot, for cowardice, desertion . . . and your own men, your companions, your brothers, have to shoot you . . . and I’m so fucking scared out there every day, every night— and now they’ve made me a fucking officer — What the fuck could he say to any of them? Well, there’ll be none of that swearing for a start.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“Other people", Rose thought. "Other people and their bloody love.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“They did not talk about the larger present, so circumscribed, so uncontrollable. Their little present was two bodies and a bed, and that was the entirety of time and place: them, there, in their little room, awkward, laughing, happy, warm, tentative, surrendering, overwhelmed, alarmed, astounded, shivering, subsiding, asleep, awake, getting the hang of it, learning, loving, redeemed. Happy.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“He was astounded, sometimes, by the fluid articulacy of his own fury.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You: A Novel

“More talk of love would lead to the difficulties surrounding...Oh, God, he loved her, he did, she did, they did, it was.
It was.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“Last year we had many smallish hopes, made many smallish attempts, suffered many smallish failures, and we died one by one. This year a change of plan! One big hope, one big push, one big fuck-up, and we all die at once.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“He's a man, she thought, and the very word gave her s frisson, a lurch inside.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“Look how beautiful the green lawns of the park are in the misty evening light, unmuddied, smooth, alive, no holes, no bodies, no barbed wire, no explosions. Such a simple thing to be grateful for. No wrongness. Can no wrongness be enough to make rightness? God, no wrongness. No wrongness would be fucking marvellous.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“Courage for the big troubles in life, lad' he'd say, 'and patience for the small. Be of good cheer.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“Courage for the big troubles in life, patience for the small. And when you have laboriously finished your day's efforts, go to sleep in peace. Be of good cheer.”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“...one of the new conscripts, a useless, terrified little creature.... These boys are no use out here. Why send them? Why not recognise that cowardice is a fact and most cowards wish they weren't, and it's not their fault and it's not under their control, and keep them the hell out of our way while we get on with it?”
― Louisa Young, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

“When things get honed too much they're not true anymore. If they comes out a bit rough, that's good.”
― Louisa Young, Twelve Months and a Day

“She'd said, "Put me on the compost heap" but she hadn't meant it. She'd meant just "don't make a fuss." But funerals are for the living, and the living wanted a fuss.”
― Louisa Young, Twelve Months and a Day

“Sometimes a person wants two things and doesn’t even know it. Sometimes those things might be mutually exclusive, but a person might never find out if they are or not because they already feel so far out on a limb they don’t feel they can stick their neck out as well. Sometimes it might be a good idea to stick your neck out.”
― Louisa Young, Twelve Months and a Day

“One day when we're all dead the algorithms will still be spamming away, sending their junk out eternally across the universe, trying to flog each other control leggings and online guitar courses . . .”
― Louisa Young, Twelve Months and a Day