Vera Brittain
Vera Brittain
Vera Mary Brittainwas an English nurse, writer, feminist, 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...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth29 December 1893
achievement citizens combined faced greater lesser liberation longer major mankind members millions period previous races series societies stage strangely subject united violence wars workers
At no previous period has mankind been faced by a half-century which so paradoxically united violence and progress. Its greater and lesser wars and long series of major assassinations have been strangely combined with the liberation of more societies and individuals than ever before in history, and by the transformation of millions of second-class citizens -- women, workers and the members of subject races -- to a stage at which first-rate achievement is no longer inhibited even if opportunities are not yet complete.
english-writer
Meek wifehood is no part of my profession; I am your friend, but never your possession.
children parent age
belated maternity has had its compensations; small children have a habit of conferring persistent youth upon their parents, and by their eager vitality postpone the unenterprising cautions and timidities of middle age.
thinking important reform
I can think of few important movements for reform in which success was won by any method other than that of an energetic minority presenting the indifferent majority with a fait accompli, which was then accepted.
easter wind oxford
I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.
self self-righteous righteous
most of us have to be self-righteous before we can be righteous.
venice sea sculpture
Venice is all sea and sculpture ...
art writing people
So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion.
husband want may
It never seems to occur to anybody that some women may not want to find husbands.
baby husband children
Babies are a nuisance, of course. But so does everything seem to be that is worthwhile - husbands and books and committees and being loved and everything. We have to choose between ease and rich unrest.
baby motherhood joy
The joys of motherhood are not excessively apparent during the first few weeks of a baby's life.
honesty people sorrow
Why, I wonder, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, and who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth-that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent, and every setback insuperable?
character interesting people
If the would-be writer studies people in their everyday lives and discovers how to make his characters in their quieter moods interesting to his readers, he will have learned far more than he can ever learn from the constant presentation of crises.
children men order
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.