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

Vera Brittain

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Vera Brittain
Age: 76 †
Born: 1893
Born: December 29
Died: 1970
Died: March 29
Feminist
Journalist
Novelist
Nurse
Pacifist
Peace Activist
Poet
Suffragist
Writer
Vera Mary Brittain
Providence
Mercy
Understood
Never

More quotes by Vera Brittain

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The pacifist's task today is to find a method of helping and healing which provides a revolutionary constructive substitute for war.
Vera Brittain
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I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.
Vera Brittain
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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.
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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.
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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.
Vera Brittain
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The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.
Vera Brittain
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I thought that spring must last forevermore, For I was young and loved, and it was May.
Vera Brittain
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Modern war and modern civilisation are utterly incompatible...one or the other must go.
Vera Brittain
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The tragedy of journalism lies in its impermanence the very topicality which gives it brilliance condemns it to an early death. Too often it is a process of flinging bright balloons in the path of the hurricane, a casting of priceless petals upon the rushing surface of a stream.
Vera Brittain
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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.
Vera Brittain
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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
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An author who waits for the right 'mood' will soon find that 'moods' get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether.
Vera Brittain
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Babies are a nuisance, of course. But so does everything seem to be that is worth while – husbands and books and committees and being loved and everything. We have to choose between barren ease and rich unrest – or rather, one does not choose.
Vera Brittain
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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
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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.
Vera Brittain
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It never seems to occur to anybody that some women may not want to find husbands.
Vera Brittain
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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.
Vera Brittain
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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?
Vera Brittain
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Venice is all sea and sculpture.
Vera Brittain
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There is an abiding beauty which may be appreciated by those who will see things as they are and who will ask for no reward except to see.
Vera Brittain