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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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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
Happens
Characteristics
May
Wherever
World
Level
Events
Levels
Humanity
Happen
Disconcerting
Ability
Reduce

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We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence.
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few things are more rewarding than a child's open uncalculating devotion.
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However deep our devotion may be to parents or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire.
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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.
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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?
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It never seems to occur to anybody that some women may not want to find husbands.
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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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The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.
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College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation
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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.
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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.
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Venice is all sea and sculpture.
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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.
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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.
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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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An author who waits for the right 'mood' will soon find that 'moods' get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether.
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Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.
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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.
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The joys of motherhood are not excessively apparent during the first few weeks of a baby's life.
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Modern war and modern civilisation are utterly incompatible...one or the other must go.
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