The Regeneration Trilogy Quotes

“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, The Regeneration Trilogy

“died. 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, The Regeneration Trilogy

“In leading his patients to understand that breakdown was nothing to be ashamed of, that horror and fear were inevitable responses to the trauma of war and were better acknowledged than suppressed, that feelings of tenderness for other men were natural and right, that tears were an acceptable and helpful part of grieving, he was setting himself against the whole tenor of their upbringing. They’d been trained to identify emotional repression as the essence of manliness.”
― Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy

“Love for your bairns, yes. Love for a man? No.’ She turned to him, almost aggressively. ‘What do you think?’ ‘I don’t know.”
― Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy

“A long, companionable silence. They were too replete with company and conversation to want to talk much, too comfortable to make the move for bed.”
― Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy

“There are no words. There are no words for what I felt when I saw the setting sun rise.”
― Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy

“Some MOs would send a corpse back if you propped one up in front of them, particularly now when every man was needed for the latest in a long line of 'one last pushes'.”
― Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy

“Suicides were rare now. The war had cheered everybody up.”
― Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy

“He’d found himself wondering once or twice recently what possible meaning the restoration of mental health could have in relation to his work. Normally a cure implies that the patient will no longer engage in behaviour that is clearly self-destructive. But in present circumstances, recovery meant the resumption of activities that were not merely self-destructive but positively suicidal. But then in a war nobody is a free agent. He and Yealland were both locked in, every bit as much as their patients were.”
― Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy

“Rivers thought how misleading it was to say that the war had ‘matured’ these young men. It wasn’t true of his patients, and it certainly wasn’t true of Burns, in whom a prematurely aged man and a fossilized schoolboy seemed to exist side by side. It did give him a curiously ageless quality, but ‘maturity’ was hardly the word.”
― Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy

“He looked at his face in the glass. In this half-light, against white tiles, it looked scarcely less ghostly than Orme’s. A memory tweaked the edges of his mind. Another glass, on the top landing at home, a dark, oval mirror framing the face of a small, pale child. Himself. Five years old, perhaps. Now why did he remember that? Birds had been singing, then, too. Sparrows, twittering in the ivy. A day of shouts and banged doors and tears in rooms he was not allowed to enter. The day his father left home. Or the day he died? No, the day he left. Sassoon smiled, amused at the link he’d discovered, and then stopped smiling. He’d joked once or twice to Rivers about his being his father confessor, but only now, faced with this second abandonment, did he realize how completely Rivers had come to take his father’s place.”
― Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy