Joe Ahearn

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

“The gentle rustle of armies crawling the planet like ants. Anybody with any sense knows what’s coming.”
― Vanessa Veselka, Zazen

“This reinforced Rivers’s view that it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neuroses and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stress in active and constructive ways. Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace.”
― Pat Barker, Regeneration

“Fear, tenderness - these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man.”
― Pat Barker, Regeneration