Post War Quotes

“From here, we can see the line of time stretching in opposite directions for eternity. You see, Edward, there is no beginning and no end of time. The past, present, and future are all happening at once.”
― Steven Decker, One More Life to Live

“His life had been spent pursuing excellence and amassing a great fortune, but now that it was ending, there was no one he was inclined to share it with.”
― Steven Decker, One More Life to Live

“Tiny Eleanor in her black coat, is dinkily perfect, like a woman carved on a mechanical clock, nodding, lifting her hand, in jerky greeting. Her eyes might slice jealously through any gaze between Clem and Corin, but they can't sever the meaning of those gazes.”
― Lesley Glaister, A Particular Man

“Most people coming out of a war feel lost and resentful. What had been a minute-to-minute confrontation with yourself, your struggle with what courage you have against discomfort, at the least, and death at the other end, ties you to the people you have known in the war and makes, for a time, all others seem alien and frivolous. Friends are glad to see you again, but you know immediately that most of them have put you to one side, and while it is easy enough to say that you should have known that before, most of us don't, and it is painful. You are face to face with what will happen to you after death.”
― Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir

“...unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it.”
― John Clellon Holmes

“He would show up not with women but with two or three newspaper or magazine reporters. According to some of these fellows, now that the military had fallen, the impoverished poets and artists were going to be the new public heroes.”
― Osamu Dazai, ヴィヨンの妻 [Viyon No Tsuma]

“Wir sind die Generation ohne Bindung und ohne Tiefe. Unsere Tiefe ist der Abgrund.”
― Wolfgang Borchert, Selected Stories

“They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them.”
― John Clellon Holmes

“Do you remember my friend Fumiko Kobayashi? She loaned me a book by a university professor named Taki Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Patterns of Behaviour, and she writes that death, particularly voluntary death, is surrounded in this country by a heroic, romantic, aesthetic and emotional aura. She says we often find it hard to communicate and use suicide to make our ideas, or beliefs, or sufferings known. I don't know whether I believe that or not.”
― James Trager, Letters from Sachiko: A Japanese Woman's View of Life in the Land of the Economic Miracle

“There is a vague feeling that after great evil comes great good; after trouble comes absence of trouble; after war, peace. It is a mystical, rather than logical, presentiment. History does not offer any very impressive corroboration; flip over its pages and you are apt to find the disagreeable reminder that after trouble comes more trouble. Yet it is a feeling everyone must hold to.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“With their pride of controlled selfhood, their inner discipline, such players made us a little ashamed of our glad acceptance of democratic values. We had been content to think of our time as the age of the little man. By the light shed from these giant contrasts, we felt (but never, I am afraid, admitted) that ours was the age of the dwarf. Such adventures in uniqueness were rare beyond the stage door.”
― Kenneth Tynan, He That Plays the King: A View of the Theatre

“Toward the end of the Second World War, a
new consciousness arose amongst the public
and policy makers of the Western World. After
ten years of crippling economic depression
and another five at war, the public demanded
something new from their disintegrating
urban environments.”
― Lucas Mascotto-Carbone

“As the Civil War raged, large parts of the occupation experience were passed over and forgotten as quickly as possible. The Greek authorities showed little interest in pursuing war criminals, and war crimes petered out more quickly than anywhere else in Europe, whilst over-conscientious prosecutors were buried in provincial postings.”
― Mark Mazower

“---Sleeps through the washes of the morning's colors and the warm brilliance of sunrise. She sleeps in a world where she remembers, perfectly, every detail about her husband, this day, that sentence, another touch. She will remember it all in the deepest sleep, and lose it again the moment her eyes open and she wonders how late it must be for the sun to already be so high and then remembers, in the next instant, what happened the day before.”
― Ashley Hay, The Railwayman's Wife

“I think a good many people, here and everywhere, have a feeling in their bones that some sort of large-scale reawakening is in the cards for humanity.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“Britain was full of men like him, trying to find something to do in a country that had managed perfectly well without them.”
― K.J. Charles, Slippery Creatures

“Some nations desire power, some seek it, and others have it thrust upon them. By 1945, there was no doubt in Russian minds about the reality of American power in the world. But there remained a very large question as to how Americans would use that power, or even if they would use it at all.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach