Wartime Quotes

“The terrified men did not move. Then Nadia Fedin did something instinctive; she drew her Nagant revolver and fired three short bursts into the head of the nearest soldier. Stepan Ivanovich’s skull burst like a ripe cabbage showering his horrified comrades with viscous brain and bits of bone.”
― KGE Konkel, Who Has Buried the Dead?: From Stalin to Putin … The last great secret of World War Two

“Ivan, the Russian sharpshooter, was sitting, gun in hand, behind one of Borg’s men on a motorbike further down South Eaton Place. The wooden barriers, the parked lorry and the elderly gentleman with the stick were all part of Isaac Walsh’s plan, aimed at hampering the policemen and giving Abbott a chance to escape.”
― Mark Ellis, Death of an Officer

“Few would have seen Solomon and realised they were looking at one of wartime London’s top gangsters. With his receding hairline, thick-lenses spectacles, sober tie and dark two-piece suit, he resembled a local bank manager, accountant or shop owner.”
― Mark Ellis, Death of an Officer

“Merlin stood up. For once, late as it was, he was pleased to see the Assistant Commissioner because he had been trying unsuccessfully to get hold of him all day. “May I introduce Detective Bernard Goldberg of the New York Police Department.”
Merlin held out a hand to the stocky young man now standing on the AC’s right. Detective Goldberg was an inch or two shorter than Merlin, with a closely cropped head of dark-brown hair and the crumpled face of a man who might have walked into a wall.”
― Mark Ellis, The French Spy

“Aaron wondered if the Sofanomin had also lulled him to sleep. He could feel the faint remnants of a strange dream; weird people in odd clothing, peculiar carriages that moved although no horses pulled them”
― Robert Reid, The Empress:

“Fire supposed he needed to be there in order to give rousing speeches and lead the charge into the fray, or whatever is was commanders did in wartime. She resented his competence at something so tragic and senseless. She wished he, or somebody, would throw down his sword and say, 'Enough! This is a silly way to decide who's in charge!' And it seemed to her, as the beds in the healing room filled and emptied and filled, that these battles didn't leave much to be in charge of. The kingdom was already broken, and this war was tearing the broken pieces smaller.”
― Kristin Cashore, Fire

“McGuire started to rub the soap across himself, amazed at the change in his own skin colour as the filth of years of poverty floated off him.”
― Nigel Seed, No Road to Khartoum

“Witnessing all of those hardworking female street vendors in Vietnam also made me understand why my mom felt so passionate about me and my sisters working. While we were in Vietnam together, she explained that the country had a history of always being in wartime, so women were expected to rise to the occasion of making money for the family. Vietnamese women were always ready to take over roles traditionally filled by men, Like A League of Their Own (but where everyone is Marla Hooch). I also understood why my mom wasn't into processing her feelings, and how she was taught to just get over tragedy. To survive, she had to believe things like depression and allergies were a choice. In a culture entrenched in wartime, those who chose to be unhappy or to refuse gluten didn't last long.”
― Ali Wong, Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice for Living Your Best Life

“I don’t have to explain myself to you. This is my Emporium, mine, and you’re here at my consent or not at all. But, since you’ve flaunted your way in here to make your accusations, I’ll have you know this: I was the first to sign up. I was at the recruiting office when summer was still high. I’d be in France now, doing my part for my King and my Country, if they would have had me. Coward? Walk into my Emporium and call me a coward? I’m no coward, madam. My name is Emil Godman and, what’s more, I am no one’s young man. I am nobody’s, do you hear? I’m not in danger of neglecting a soul, because I don’t have a soul I could neglect! Do you understand!?”
― Robert Dinsdale, The Toymakers

“Bread was always a proper loaf; there was no sliced bread then, or wrappings, or gloves. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you would cut a slice of bread to find you had cut right through a dead spider. Apparently, after turning off the ovens, spiders used to crawl inside to keep warm, get locked in with the next day’s baking and burrow into the soft yeast to try and escape the heat and then get baked. My mam said that it was quite common, as indeed it was, as it happened a couple of times after. I told the baker and he gave me a free bun. About four years later I was on my way to school and he shouted across the road ‘Had any spiders lately?’ I said ‘Yes, two.”
― G. A. A. Kent, Passing Clouds

“There were no rules, only consequences.”
― Hilary McKay, The Skylarks’ War

“And as I went up to him and took his hands, I felt that I had made no mistakes; and although I knew that, in a sense which could never be true of him, I was linked with the past that I had yielded up, inextricably and for ever, I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning.”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“The toys can help in the battle."

"Mother Ginger? I doubt it!"

"Never underestimate the value of a mother in wartime. She has the most to fight for.”
― Gregory Maguire, Hiddensee

“There was plenty going on in and around the town. With the War Effort there used to be parties and dances, travelling circuses, fairs, cinemas and the like to cheer people up.
There weren’t many men about. “Our boys are away fighting” the women used to say. Things went onto rationing and everyone was given a gas mask. Mine was a pink one called a Mickey Mouse mask.”
― G. A. A. Kent, Passing Clouds

“Elle variait ses hallucinations à son gré. Elle ne se contentait pas du passé; elle escomptait l'avenir! Elle changeait le présent selon sa volonté; elle mentait et se trompait elle-même, mais comme ses mensonges étaient ses propres oeuvres, elle les chérissait. Pour de brefs instants, elle était heureuse. Il n'y avait plus à son bonheur ces limites imposées par le réel. Tout était possible, tout était à sa portée. D'abord, la guerre était finie.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“It was far easier to imagine the annihilation of one's entire family than to picture things that now belonged to a distant, impossible past, say an array of bottles of imported liquors in a Ginza shopwindow, or the sight of neon signs flickering in the night sky over the Ginza. As a result our imagination confined itself to easier paths. Imagination like this, which follows the path of least resistance, has no connection with coldness of heart, no matter how cruel it may appear. It is nothing but the product of a lazy, tepid mind.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“By the way, there was also a carpet beater round the back of the scullery door made of cane. But I don’t think I will go there.”
― G. A. A. Kent, Passing Clouds

“There were not rules, only consequences”
― Hilary McKay, The Skylarks’ War

“You see, when everything else is gone, there's always work. I don't think anyone ever realises how much work can mean until the other things are gone.”
― Vera Brittain, The Dark Tide

“She and her brother, harvesting those long, tall flowers, some almost as tall as they were. She bit into a husk. Her nostrils filled with a hay-like scent that seemed to linger on her fingers. Even now, she knew the familiar fragrance…”
― Suzy Davies, The Nightingale and The Sunflower

“The fight for necessities - water, food, shelter, schools, hospitals, a common good. As always, he would take his tipper lorry of language and empty the horror in plain view, so no one could claim they had not known. There was nothing more to say and, of course, he would go on saying that same nothing.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“Only Alan, Mara thought, understood her fury at the obscenity of the shops, aisles of abundance like temple offerings for the gods; at her colleagues' impassioned debates about the merits of certain restaurants as if they were moral questions. She could not adjust the levels in herself, the speed and volume inside, her ever-greater foreboding and rage. She could not acclimatise to the hospital's reliable electricity, ready machinery, shifts that ended, the safe walk home. She could not comprehend her colleagues' banter at the operating table, their self-assigned systems of reward and entitlement. The absence of bombardment.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“During World Wars I and II, wartime food restrictions that virtually eliminated meat consumption in Scandinavian countries were followed by a decline in the mortality rate (by ≈2 deaths/1000) that returned to prewar levels after the restriction was lifted (7–12).”
― Pramil Singh

“Was it not all a dead-end occupation, nursing back to health men to be patched up and returned to the trenches, or a man to be patched up, court-martialled, and shot? The difference lay in the Ideal.”
― Ellen N. La Motte, The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse

“Mustard gas, which is the favorite frightfulness of the Hun, does not smell like mustard at all. Its pungency is something like the taste of mustard, but its smell is that of sour, fermented raspberry, with mold on top.”
― Clair Kenamore

“I sought his giggles
beneath the ashes
where all his dreams
found home...”
― Lila Marquez, Line Breaker: A Collection of Poems

“He gazed around in near despair. Where he had never had an issue with so-called free time, he was suddenly lost without his research; torn between uncompromising tenderness for Lyra and Jyn and a sense of burden in being able to provide a flawless future for them.
The Vallt he missed no longer existed; nor did the Coruscant he and Lyra had left more than a standard year earlier. Despite the changes war had brought to the Core it might still be possible for them to ride out the conflict here. Even if it meant avoiding HoloNet news reports and steering clear of conversations about war and politics. Surely they could manage that much. Perhaps the war would end as abruptly as it had begun and life would return to normal—or at least to what had been considered normal beforehand.”
― James Luceno, Star Wars: Catalyst - A Rogue One Novel

“Peace is one thing we all want and the thing we all need. But the problem is that we spend lots of time waiting for the war to stop instead of taking steps to end it.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya, Our Nepal, Our Pride

“De som styr har inte det mod som krävs, och jag hör dig säga att man måste ha vuxit upp som jag, i städer där man kan tänka allt och säga allt utan att frukta något, för att kunna avstå från att ta risker.”
― Marc Levy, All Those Things We Never Said

“A ruler of peace,” I repeated with vicious annoyance. “You were not ruling under peaceful times, and a peaceful ruler—" I strained to find the words as my temper heated—"a peaceful ruler does not mean you do nothing.”
― Kailey Bright, Unity