Bonnie

“New recruits cry when they come here and they think about their mothers and their sweethearts and they think about going home. They remember what it is about home that holds their hearts; not sentiment or show but faces they love. Most of these recruits aren’t seventeen and they’re asked to do in a few weeks. What vexes the best philosophers for a lifetime; that is, to gather of their passion for life and make sense of it in the face of death.

They don’t know how, but they do know how to forget, and little by little they put aside the burning summer in their body, and all they have instead is lust and rage.”
― janette winterson

“It’s hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment. During the days that Bonaparte stayed in Boulogne, there was a feeling of urgency and privilege. He woke before us and slept along after us, going through every detail of our training and rallying us personally. He stretched his hand towards the Channel and made England sound as though she already belonged to us. To each of us. That was his gift. He became the focus of our lives. The thought of fighting excited us. No one wants to be killed but the hardship, the long hours, the cold, the orders were things we would have endured anyway on the farms or in the towns. We were not free men. He made sense out of dullness.”
― janette winterson

“And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.”
― janette winterson

“When we came here, we came from our mothers and our sweethearts. We were still used to our mothers with their work-hard arms that could clout the strongest of us and leave our ears ringing. And we courted our sweethearts in the country way. Slow, with the fields that ripen at harvest. Fierce, with the sows that rut the earth. Here, without women, with only our imaginations and a handful of whores, we can’t remember what it is about women that can turn a man through passion into something holy. Bible words again, but I am thinking of my father, who shaded his eyes on those sunburnt evenings and learned to take his time with my mother. I am thinking of my mother with her noisy heart and of all the women waiting in the fields for the men who drowned yesterday and all the mothers’ sons who have taken their place.

We never think of them here. We think of their bodies and now and then we talk about home but we don’t think of them as they are; the most solid, the best loved, the well known.

They go on. Whatever we do or undo, they go on.”
― janette winterson