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A review by diana_skelton
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
3.0
"In my later teens, I often used to consider the incalculable advantages of heredity and early environment that are involved in merely being born a member of such [distingushed] families. What really seems remarkable is not that the undistingushed residue produces only half the sum of human talent, but that those who belong to it ever emerge at all from the blackest obscurity."
"A dozen years' periodic observation of Oxford dons has led me to doubt whether, even for those misguided dupes the boys and girls of the War generation, an over-development of the critical faculty would not have been at least as dangerous as its under-development. The latter, at any rate, does nothing to destroy that vitality which is more important than any other quality in combating the obcstacles, the set-backs and the obtuse ridicule which are more often encountered in early youth than at any other time."
"Most people 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, still encourages the production of unwanted children by exhausted mothers, and still compels married partners who hate one another to live together in the name of morality."
"To me and my contemporaries, with our cheerful confidence in the benignity of fate, War was something remote, unimaginable, its monstrous destructions and distresses safely shut up, like the Black Death and the Great Fire, between the covers of history books."
"I don't think I am ever likely to marry as [...] I could not endure to be constantly propitiating any man or to have a large range of subjects on which it was quite impossible to talk to him. [...] I always think of Roland as a mind in tune with mine, in which many of the notes are quite different from mine but all are in the same key."
"She felt sure I knew as well as she did that if one had an original mind and something of ambition, it was not by poring over books that one grew and developed. One's intellect, she said, could always take care of itself. It was one's personality that counted, and that could be better nourished sometimes in active life than in halls of learning."
"Short of actually going to bed with [the patients], there was hardly an intimate service that I did not perform for one or another in the course of four years, and I still have reason to be thankful for the knowledge of masculine functioning which the care of them gave me, and for my early release from the sex-inhibitions that even to-day – thanks to the Victorian tradition which up to 1914 dictated that a young woman should know nothing of men but their faces and their clothes until marriage pitchforked her into an incompletely visualised and highly disconcerting intimacy – beset many of my female contemporaries, both married and single."
"'You will be amused to hear that I am making myself quite hardened to blackbeetles. Last night when I was washing up cups in the surgical kitchen, they were running about the floor and tumbling over one another in the sink. I didn't run away. I just fatsened my skirt up andd went on wahsing the cups. I consider that as quite the most heroic thing I have done since the War started.'
From trenches in which blackbeetles must have appeared an extremely desirable alternative to their most numerous inhabitants, he replied, ' The sky was wonderful as we came along an hour ago--deep blue with mackerel spots of light gold clouds in the the west meshed like chain armour on a blue ground and below in the horizon a long bar of cloud so dark as to look purple against the sun."
"Sometimes my heart feels very tumultuous, full of passion and fierce desire; at others it is possessed of a sort of blank and dessparing resignation to what feels inevitable."
"The trouble about men's and women's relationships, I concluded self-contemptuously, was never so much adultery as adulteration; love that had once been a torrent flood had meandered through mediocre plains until it had run dry, and lost itself in a limitless desert of sand."
"A dozen years' periodic observation of Oxford dons has led me to doubt whether, even for those misguided dupes the boys and girls of the War generation, an over-development of the critical faculty would not have been at least as dangerous as its under-development. The latter, at any rate, does nothing to destroy that vitality which is more important than any other quality in combating the obcstacles, the set-backs and the obtuse ridicule which are more often encountered in early youth than at any other time."
"Most people 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, still encourages the production of unwanted children by exhausted mothers, and still compels married partners who hate one another to live together in the name of morality."
"To me and my contemporaries, with our cheerful confidence in the benignity of fate, War was something remote, unimaginable, its monstrous destructions and distresses safely shut up, like the Black Death and the Great Fire, between the covers of history books."
"I don't think I am ever likely to marry as [...] I could not endure to be constantly propitiating any man or to have a large range of subjects on which it was quite impossible to talk to him. [...] I always think of Roland as a mind in tune with mine, in which many of the notes are quite different from mine but all are in the same key."
"She felt sure I knew as well as she did that if one had an original mind and something of ambition, it was not by poring over books that one grew and developed. One's intellect, she said, could always take care of itself. It was one's personality that counted, and that could be better nourished sometimes in active life than in halls of learning."
"Short of actually going to bed with [the patients], there was hardly an intimate service that I did not perform for one or another in the course of four years, and I still have reason to be thankful for the knowledge of masculine functioning which the care of them gave me, and for my early release from the sex-inhibitions that even to-day – thanks to the Victorian tradition which up to 1914 dictated that a young woman should know nothing of men but their faces and their clothes until marriage pitchforked her into an incompletely visualised and highly disconcerting intimacy – beset many of my female contemporaries, both married and single."
"'You will be amused to hear that I am making myself quite hardened to blackbeetles. Last night when I was washing up cups in the surgical kitchen, they were running about the floor and tumbling over one another in the sink. I didn't run away. I just fatsened my skirt up andd went on wahsing the cups. I consider that as quite the most heroic thing I have done since the War started.'
From trenches in which blackbeetles must have appeared an extremely desirable alternative to their most numerous inhabitants, he replied, ' The sky was wonderful as we came along an hour ago--deep blue with mackerel spots of light gold clouds in the the west meshed like chain armour on a blue ground and below in the horizon a long bar of cloud so dark as to look purple against the sun."
"Sometimes my heart feels very tumultuous, full of passion and fierce desire; at others it is possessed of a sort of blank and dessparing resignation to what feels inevitable."
"The trouble about men's and women's relationships, I concluded self-contemptuously, was never so much adultery as adulteration; love that had once been a torrent flood had meandered through mediocre plains until it had run dry, and lost itself in a limitless desert of sand."