I May Be Some Time Quotes

“Men fighting other men in wars might wrestle sympathetically with loneliness and fear, but men confronting an implacable environment which was, by definition, stronger than them, might grow to experience the female variety of grace under pressure, for which 'resignation' was an inaccurate word, though a reliable pointer. It did not mean surrender; it was more a species of self-preservation in the face of circumstances that could not be changed, a deliberate decision to inhabit the impossible situation on one's own terms, rather than flailing uselessly against it.”
― Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination

“Everyone who read Scott's diaries, as they became available, wished for the safety of the doomed party that they thought they had come to know. A biographer recorded the odd hope he experienced, each time he re-read the documents, that this time things might turn out differently, this time they might make it home. Empathy was vital to the response of the audience. Equally, a perverse and marginal satisfaction can be detected in the behavior of the survivors, not at all a satisfaction that the polar party died, but that they should have made their undesired end so magnificently, so much in accordance with the principles of sublime defeat that the survivors could raise as their appropriate epitaph the grimly glorious last line of Tennyson's 'Ulysses': To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
― Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination