Requiem for a Wren Quotes

“doubt if he’d have made the grade for the rabbit pack, though. He wasn’t fierce enough; he was one of those bumbling, good humoured, rather incompetent dogs, good for a lonely man or girl to look after.”
― Nevil Shute, The Breaking Wave

“By 1948 I was safe on my feet and able to get about quite normally, but I was thirty-four and life was slipping past me. I could not face burial alive in Coombargana at that age after all that I had been and done during the war, and I began to feel I should go crazy if I didn’t get away from it to England again, where things were happening. I think my parents understood, because they made no objection when I suggested that I should go back to Oxford for a year and finish taking my degree. That was five years ago. What I didn’t realise then was that it wasn’t England I was really fretting for. It was my lost youth.”
― Nevil Shute, Requiem for a Wren

“It was incongruous at Coombargana. In a great city such things happen now and then, where people are too strained and hurried to pay much attention to the griefs of others, but in a small rural community like ours, led by wise and tolerant people such as my father and mother, staffed by good types culled and weeded out over the years, such secret, catastrophic griefs do not occur. Troubles at Coombargana had always been small troubles in my lifetime.”
― Nevil Shute, The Breaking Wave

“Even into this quiet place the war had reached like the tentacle of an octopus and had touched this girl and brought about her death. Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it’s all over.”
― Nevil Shute, The Breaking Wave

“I was at Geelong Grammar.” The Eton of Australia meant nothing to her.”
― Nevil Shute, The Breaking Wave

“When you and I are dead, and all the rest of us who served in the last war, in all the countries,” she said, “there’ll be a chance of world peace. Not till then.”
― Nevil Shute, The Breaking Wave

“There are some things about oneself that it’s not very nice to wake up to.”
― Nevil Shute, Requiem for a Wren

“When things like this happen there’s just nothing to be done about it; even suffering itself is a mere waste of time.”
― Nevil Shute, The Breaking Wave

“They’re terribly anxious to see him married, and they’re always gossiping. And then Mrs. Plowden said, “He might do worse than look in his own kitchen, to my way of thinking.” And Annie said, “Aye, that’s a fact. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened, and it won’t be the last.”
― Nevil Shute, The Breaking Wave

“I stopped reading and stared round the room. There were the new curtains, the new shades on all the lamps, the deep new pile of the Indian carpet beneath my feet, the new loose cover of the chair that I was sitting in, the slightly different appearance of the wallpaper by the electric switch, the gleam of the new paint. I had not noticed any of them.”
― Nevil Shute, The Breaking Wave

“Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it's all over.”
― Nevil Shute, Requiem for a Wren

“I had travelled the world and I had come to realise, in faint surprise, that I had seen no countryside that could compare in pastoral beauty with that of my own home. It takes a long time for an Australian to accept the fact that the wide, bustling, sophisticated world of the northern hemisphere cannot compare with his own land in certain ways;”
― Nevil Shute, The Breaking Wave

“after all that I had read during the night. Even into this quiet place the war had reached like the tentacle of an octopus and had touched this girl and brought about her death. Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it’s all over.”
― Nevil Shute, The Breaking Wave

“I was very depressed in those months, because it’s not funny to lose both your feet when you’re thirty years old.”
― Nevil Shute, The Breaking Wave

“I think dogs need our prayers more than people. We know that God looks after people when they die and that Daddy and Mummy and Bill are all right, but we don’t know that about dogs.”
― Nevil Shute, The Breaking Wave

“It was her dog getting killed that put the lid on it,” said Viola, seven years later. “Funny, that, wasn’t it? She stood up quite well when your brother got killed and when her father got killed, but when the dog got killed it finished her. I suppose she felt responsible or something.” “I suppose she did,” I said. “What happened after”
― Nevil Shute, The Breaking Wave

“Until we’re dead, we Service people, the world will always be in danger of another war. We had too good a time in the last one. We’ll none of us come out into the open and admit it. It might be better for us if we did. [...] For our generation, the war years were the best time of our lives, not because they were war years but because we were young. The best years of our lives happened to be war years. Everyone looks back at the time when they were in their early twenties with nostalgia, but when we look back we only see the war. We had a fine time then, and so we think that if a third war came we’d have those happy, carefree years all over again. I don’t suppose we would—some of us might.”
― Nevil Shute, Requiem for a Wren

“Throughout the autumn and the winter activity increased in the Beaulieu area, and with it came mysteries. Lepe House, the mansion at the entrance to the river, was taken over by the Navy and became full of secretive Naval officers; it became known that this was part of a mysterious Navel entity called 'Force J'. Near Lepe House and at the very mouth of the river a construction gang began work in full strength to make a hard, sloping concrete platform running down into the river where the flat-bottomed landing craft could beach to refuel and let their ramps down to embark the vehicles and tanks. This place was about two miles from 'Mastodon'. A mile or so along the coast a country house was occupied by a secret Naval party who did strange things with tugs and wires and winches, and with what looked like a gigantic reel of cotton floating in the sea; this was 'Pluto', Pipe Line Under The Ocean, which was to lay pipes from England to France to carry petrol to supply the armies which were due to land in Normandy. On a bare beach nearby a thousand navvies were camped making huge concrete structures known as 'Phoenix', one of many such sites all along the coast. It was not till after the invasion that it became known that these were a part of the artificial harbour 'Mulberry' on the north coast of France.”
― Nevil Shute, Requiem for a Wren

“Before she had been a year at Ford Janet came to look forward to her next pass with something close to apprehension; it was pitiful to see her mother ageing and be unable to help her, to see her father turning into just another poor old man.”
― Nevil Shute, The Breaking Wave

“She said, “Aye, they’re getting for him everything the heart of man could desire, saving the one thing.” I asked, “What’s that?” She said, “A wife.” She’s very shrewd.”
― Nevil Shute, Requiem for a Wren