bell > bell's Quotes

“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, The Silence of the Girls

“Grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“I thought: Suppose, suppose just once, once, all these centuries, the slippery gods keep their word and Achilles is granted eternal glory in return for his early death under the walls of Troy...? What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won't want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won't want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they'll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Men carve meaning into women’s faces; messages addressed to other men.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“As later Priam comes secretly to the enemy camp to plead with Achilles for the return of his son Hector's body, he says: "'I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son."
Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. 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 brothers.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Silence becomes a woman.' Every woman I’ve ever known was brought up on that saying.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“The defeated go down in history and disappear, and their stories die with them.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own