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 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.
friends children parent
However deep our devotion may be to parents or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire.
meek possession profession
Meek wifehood is no part of my profession; / I am your friend, but never your possession.
eye poet prose
The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.
humanity world levels
Few of humanity's characteristics are more disconcerting than its ability to reduce world-events to its own level, wherever this may happen to be.
college secluded vegetation
College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation
attitude lying men
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.
party book people
Nevertheless, hateful as saying 'No' always is to an imaginative person, and certain as the offence may be that it will cause to individuals whose own work does not require isolated effort, the writer who is engaged on a book must learn to say it. He must say it consistently to all interrupters; to the numerous callers and correspondents who want him to speak, open bazaars, see them for 'only' ten minutes, attend literary parties, put people up, or read, correct and find publishers for semi-literate manuscripts by his personal friends.
successful ideas order
The idea that it is necessary to go to a university in order to become a successful writer . . . is one of those fantasies that surround authorship.
war men suffering
Most men, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war.
spring lasts may
I thought that spring must last forevermore, For I was young and loved, and it was May.
work passion careers
Definite gifts render their possessors capable of overcoming any obstacle this side of death; they create an impetus of far more genuine value than external advantages in some other career where the impulse to make use of them remains weak or non-existent. The work that one enjoys is the greatest source of happiness and vitality in life.