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Vera Brittain Quotes

Vera Mary Brittain was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, writer, feminist, socialist, and pacifist. Her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism. Wikipedia  

✵ 29. December 1893 – 29. March 1970
Vera Brittain photo

Works

Testament of Youth
Testament of Youth
Vera Brittain
Vera Brittain: 10   quotes 6   likes

Famous Vera Brittain Quotes

“We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence.”

Vera Brittain book Testament of Youth

Source: Testament of Youth (1933), Chapter 10

“All that a pacifist can undertake—but it is a very great deal—is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.”

Vera Brittain

"What Can We Do In Wartime?", in Forward (Scotland, September 9, 1939)

“For a woman as for a man, marriage might enormously help or devastatingly hinder the growth of her power to contribute something impersonally valuable to the community in which she lived, but it was not that power, and could not be regarded as an end in itself. Nor, even, were children ends in themselves; it was useless to go on producing human beings merely in order that they, in their sequence, might produce others, and never turn from this business of continuous procreation to the accomplishment of some definite and lasting piece of work.”

Vera Brittain book Testament of Youth

Source: Testament of Youth (1933), Chapter 11

“I don't think victory over death… is anything so superficial as a person fulfilling their normal span of life. It can be twofold; a victory over death by the man who faces it for himself without fear, and a victory by those who, loving him, know that death is but a little thing compared with the fact that he lived and was the kind of person he was.”

Vera Brittain book Testament of Youth

Source: Testament of Youth (1933), Chapter 12 [quoting a 1924 letter]

“I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading.”

Vera Brittain

Quoted in Jilly Cooper and Tom Hartman, Violets and Vinegar, "The Battle Done," (1980)

“Meek wifehood is no part of my profession; / I am your friend, but never your possession.”

Vera Brittain

"Married Love", Poems of the War and After (1934)

Vera Brittain Quotes

“Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.”

Vera Brittain

The Rebel Passion (1964), Chapter 1

“How futile it had all been, that superhuman gallantry! It had amounted, in the end, to nothing but a passionate gesture of negation—the negation of all that the centuries had taught themselves through long eons of pain.”

Vera Brittain book Testament of Youth

Source: Testament of Youth (1933), Chapter XII 'Another Stranger'

Pain , Passion

“It is probably true to say that the largest scope for change still lies in men’s attitude to women, and in women’s attitude to themselves.”

Vera Brittain

Lady into Woman (1953), Chapter 15

Women , Men , Change

“Oh, life!”

Vera Brittain book Testament of Youth

I silently petitioned the future... if I do finally decide to marry G. and have a family — and I’m not absolutely certain, yet, that I really want to do either — please grant that I have only daughters; I’m afraid, in the world as it is, to have a son. Our generation is condemned, condemned, and the League, and all that it stands for, is only a brittle toy in the hands of ruthless, primeval forces!”
Source: Testament of Youth (1933), Chapter XII 'Another Stranger'

Life

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