Top 70 Pat Barker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else’s pain.”

— Pat Barker

2. “The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.”

— Pat Barker

3. “I listened and let it soothe me, that ceaseless ebb and flow, the crash of the breaking waves, the grating sigh of its retreat. It was like lying on the chest of somebody who loves you, somebody you know you can trust – though the sea loves nobody and can never be trusted. I was immediately aware of a new desire, to be part of it, to dissolve into it: the sea that feels nothing and can never be hurt.”

— Pat Barker

4. “Rivers knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the proces of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.”

— Pat Barker

5. “He shook his head. “It won’t always be like this.” “Oh, I think it might.” “No – honestly it won’t. Things do change. And if they don’t you bloody well make them.” “Spoken like a man.”

— Pat Barker

6. “Men carve meaning into women’s faces; messages addressed to other men.”

— Pat Barker

7. “Grief’s only ever as deep as the love it’s replaced.”

— Pat Barker

8. “The way I see it, when you put the uniform on, in effect you sign a contract. And you don’t back out of a contract merely because you’ve changed your mind. You can still speak up for your principles, you can still argue against the ones you’re being made to fight for, but in the end you do the job.”

— Pat Barker

9. “I thought: And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brother.”

— Pat Barker

10. “Silence becomes a woman.′ Every woman I’ve ever known was brought up on that saying.”

— Pat Barker

11. “A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.”

— Pat Barker

12. “This is what free people never understand. A slave isn’t a person who’s being treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in anybody else’s.”

— Pat Barker

13. “Somehow if she’d know the worst parts, she couldn’t have gone on being a haven for him... Men said they didn’t tell their women about France because they didn’t want to worry them. but it was more than that. He needed her ignorance to hide in. Yet, at the same time, he wanted to know and be known as deeply as possible. And the two desires were irreconcilable.”

— Pat Barker

14. “Fear, tenderness – these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man.”

— Pat Barker

15. “A hundred years from now they’ll still be ploughing up skulls. And I seemed to be in that time and looking back. I think I saw our ghosts.”

— Pat Barker

16. “So many pebbles on that beach – millions – all of them worn smooth by the sea’s relentless grinding, but not this one. This one had stayed sharp.”

— Pat Barker

17. “You know you’re walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can’t because everybody else thinks it’s your face.”

— Pat Barker

18. “How do you separate a tiger’s beauty from its ferocity? Or a cheetah’s elegance from the speed of its attack? Achilles was like that – the beauty and the terror were two sides of a single coin.”

— Pat Barker

19. “The defeated go down in history and disappear, and their stories die with them.”

— Pat Barker

20. “The silence deepened, like a fall of snow, accumulating second by second, flake by flake, each flake by itself inconsiderable, until everything is transformed.”

— Pat Barker

21. “We’re going to survive–our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams–and in their worst nightmares too.”

— Pat Barker

22. “The sky darkened, the air grew colder, but he didn’t mind. It didn’t occur to him to move. This was the right place. This was where he had wanted to be.”

— Pat Barker

23. “Yes, the death of young men in battle is a tragedy – I’d lost four brothers, I didn’t need anybody to tell me that. A tragedy worthy of any number of laments – but theirs is not the worst fate. I looked at Andromache, who’d have to live the rest of her amputated life as a slave, and I thought: We need a new song.”

— Pat Barker

24. “The process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.”

— Pat Barker

25. “Another person’s life, observed from the outside, always has a shape and definition that one’s own life lacks.”

— Pat Barker

26. “In some ways the experience of these young men paralleled the experience of the very old. They looked back on intense memories and felt lonely because there was nobody left alive who’d been there.”

— Pat Barker

27. “Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough’s army, than to think they’d been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can’t challenge. It’s like a very deep voice, saying; ‘Run along, little man, be glad you’ve survived.”

— Pat Barker

28. “Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace. So.”

— Pat Barker

29. “She was like a windflower trembling on its slender stem, so fragile you feel it can’t possibly survive the blasts that shake it, though it survives them all.”

— Pat Barker

30. “They were men, and free. I was a woman, and a slave. And that’s a chasm no amount of sentimental chit-chat about shared imprisonment should be allowed to obscure.”

— Pat Barker

31. “Sometimes at night I lie awake and quarrel with the voices in my head.”

— Pat Barker

32. “Fathers remain opaque to their sons, he thought, largely because the sons find it so hard to believe that there’s anything in the father worth seeing. Until he’s dead, and it’s too late. Mercifully, doctors are also opaque to their patients.”

— Pat Barker

33. “His idea of female beauty was a woman so fat if you slapped her backside in the morning she’d still be jiggling when you got back home for dinner.”

— Pat Barker

34. “All Achilles’s emotions seemed to be varying shades of anger.”

— Pat Barker

35. “Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making. You learned to ration your commitment to them. This moment in this tent already had the quality of remembered experience. Or perhaps he was simply getting old. But then, after all, in trench time he was old. A generation lasted six months, less than that on the Somme, barely twelve weeks.”

— Pat Barker

36. “A woman, not a thing. Wasn’t that a prize worth risking everything for, however short a time I might have to enjoy it?”

— Pat Barker

37. “Nothing happened. Well, of course nothing happened! Isn’t nothing what generally happens when you pray to the gods?”

— Pat Barker

38. “You’re a monster, do you know that?” “Yes, oddly enough, I do.” He threw his arm across Patroclus’s shoulders. “Come on, let’s eat.”

— Pat Barker

39. “Half the world’s work is done by hopeless neurotics.”

— Pat Barker

40. “The result was I went nowhere.”

— Pat Barker

41. “In his experience, premonitions of disaster were almost invariably proved false, and the road to Calvary entered on with the very lightest of hearts. MR.”

— Pat Barker

42. “Now, he can see what he’s been trying to do: to bargain with grief. Behind all this frenetic activity there’s been the hope that if he keeps his promises there’ll be no more pain. But he’s beginning to understand that grief doesn’t strike bargains. There’s no way of avoiding the agony–or even of getting through it faster. It’s got him in its claws and it won’t let go till he’s learnt every lesson it has to teach.”

— Pat Barker

43. “Murder is only killing in the wrong place.”

— Pat Barker

44. “Looking straight at the world is part of your duty as a writer.”

— Pat Barker

45. “And the Great Adventure – the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they’d devoured as boys – consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of ‘manly’ activity had actually delivered ‘feminine’ passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had hardly known. No wonder they broke down.”

— Pat Barker

46. “On the face of it he seemed to be congratulating himself on dealing with patients more humanely than Yealland, but then why the mood of self-accusation? In the dream he stood in Yealland’s place. The dream seemed to be saying, in dream language, don’t flatter yourself. There is no distinction.”

— Pat Barker

47. “But he does worry about it – in the long hours of darkness. And then, in the morning, he forgets the weakness of the night.”

— Pat Barker

48. “Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn’t know the answer. What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.”

— Pat Barker

49. “The military authorities say uniforms must be preserved at all costs, but that means manhandling patients who are in agony. Cut them off, says Sister Byrd, and she’s the voice of authority here, in the Salle d’Attente, not some gold-braid-encrusted crustacean miles away from blood and pain, so cut they do, snip, snip, snip, snip, as close to the skin as they dare.”

— Pat Barker

50. “Achilles’ story never ends: wherever men fight and die, you’ll find Achilles.”

— Pat Barker