Life Class Quotes

“His happiness was almost painful, like circulation returning to a dead leg.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“...the white bowl of the street began to fill with darkness, from the pavement upwards, like somebody pouring tea into a cup.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“But then, that's the question. Should you even pause to consider your own reactions? These men suffer so much more than he does, more than he can imagine. In the face of their suffering, isn't it self-indulgent to think about his own feelings? He has nobody to talk to about such things and blunders his way through as best he can. If you feel nothing -this is what he comes back to time and time again -you might just as well be a machine, and machines aren't very good at caring for people. There's something machine-like about a lot of the professional nurses here. Even Sister Byrd, whom he admires, he looks at her sometimes and sees an automaton. Well, lucky for her, perhaps. It's probably more efficient to be like that. Certainly less painful.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“The easel had a cloth draped over it. Ideally, he shouldn’t look at the painting at all tonight. The gaslight flickered, its bluish tinge changing every color and tone in the room. No, no, it would be a complete waste of time. But the painting seemed to call to him. At last he could stand it no longer. He jumped up and pulled off the cloth. My God. It looked as if it had been painted by somebody else. That was his first thought. It had an authority that he didn’t associate with his stumbling, uncertain, inadequate self. It seemed to stand alone. Really, to have nothing much to do with him. He’d painted the worst aspect of his duties as an orderly: infusing hydrogen peroxide or carbolic acid into a gangrenous wound. Though the figure by the bed, carrying out this unpleasant task, was by no means a self-portrait. Indeed, it was so wrapped up in rubber and white cloth: gown, apron, cap, mask, gloves—ah, yes, the all-important gloves—that it had no individual features. Its anonymity, alone, made it appear threatening. No ministering angel, this. A white-swaddled mummy intent on causing pain. The patient was nothing: merely a blob of tortured nerves. It shook him. He stood back from it, looked, looked away, back again. It must be the gaslight that was so transforming his view of it. And he was no nearer knowing if it was finished, though at the moment he felt he wouldn’t dare do anything else.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“The road was clogged with limbers and motor vehicles and men marching towards the front. They look like a machine: all the boots moving as one, shoulders bristling with rifles, arms swinging, everything pointing forwards. And on the other side of the road, men stumbling back, trying to keep time, half dead from exhaustion and with this incredible stench hanging over them. You get whiffs of it when you cut the clothes off wounded men, but out there, in the mass, it’s as solid as a wall. And they all look so gray, faces twitching, young men who’ve been turned into old men. It’s a great contrast, stark and terrible, because they’re the same men, really. It’s an irrigation system, full buckets going one way, empty buckets the other. Only it’s not water the buckets carry.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“Two miles up the road to hell. No point blaming those women because they couldn’t imagine it. He could hardly realize it himself, sitting there by the window, stirring his coffee, bubbling with excitement about his room, the work he intended to do there, and the new idea that was beginning to take root in his mind.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“The military authorities say uniforms must be preserved at all costs, but that means manhandling patients who are in agony. Cut them off, says Sister Byrd, and she’s the voice of authority here, in the Salle d’Attente, not some gold-braid-encrusted crustacean miles away from blood and pain, so cut they do, snip, snip, snip, snip, as close to the skin as they dare.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“Rachel, who before her marriage had been a promising pianist, and now sat with the baby on her knee, picking out nursery tunes with one finger. Nev said it wouldn’t be like that, and she believed him—or at least she believed he meant it—but it would, because marriage changed everything. It had its own logic, its own laws, and they were independent of the desires and intentions of those who entered into it. She felt a moment’s pleasure in the cynicism of this perception, though God knows it was depressing enough.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“Look, leave your fucking compassion at the door, it’s no use to anybody here.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“A stir of desire, almost indistinguishable from irritation. He wasn't in the mood for 'the treatment' - by which he meant the air of intimacy Elinor created between herself and any man she spoke to, though to be fair it wasn't only men, he'd seen her adopt exactly the same approach to women.

[...]

He opened the door for her and watched her walk away down the corridor. With her cropped hair and straight shoulders she looked like a young soldier striding along, and for a moment he saw something in her, something of the person she might be when she was alone, not adapting in that sinuous way of hers to other people, not turning herself into a mirror to magnify whatever qualities he -- it was generally he -- fancied himself to possess.

He'd have liked to know her, that secret person, but the mirror was also a shield and she'd be in no hurry to put it down.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“Elinor retreated to the terrace where the night air on her skin felt like a hot bath. She was hurt, it had been such an onslaught. All the things she'd achieved in the past four years, the independent life she'd built for herself, seemed to count for nothing here. The only thing that mattered to her mother was finding a husband. As for painting, well, nice little hobby, very suitable, but you won't have much time for that when the children arrive.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“Everything stinks: creosote, bleach, disinfectant, soil, blood, gangrene.
The military authorities say uniforms must be preserved at all costs, but that means manhandling patients who are in agony. Cut them off, says Sister Byrd, and she's the voice of authority here, in the Salle d'Attente, not some gold-braid-encrusted crustacean miles away from blood and pain, so cut they do, snip, snip, snip, snip, as close to the skin as they dare.
On either side of Paul as he cuts are two long rows of feet: yellow, strong, calloused, scarred where blisters have formed and burst repeatedly. Since August they've done a lot of marching, these feet, and all their marching has brought them to this one place.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“I do miss you so much, but it gets harder and harder to keep you in my mind. You re like a ghost almost, fading in the light of dawn. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to summon up your face and I cant see you anymore. Then at other times I hear your voice so clearly I turn round expecting to see you standing there, and every time it happens there’s the same pang of loss. Cant you send me a sketch of where you are? It would help me a lot if I could picture you somewhere definite, not just have letters dropping in from outer space. Paul”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“It’s strange, isn’t it? You go on and on, or I do rather, seeing God knows what horrors and learning not to care or anyway not to care more than you need to do the job, and then something happens that gets right under your skin.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“In the face of their suffering, isn’t it self-indulgent to think about his own feelings? He has nobody to talk to about such things and blunders his way through as best he can. If you feel nothing—this is what he comes back to time and time again—you might just as well be a machine, and machines aren’t very good at caring for people.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“Perhaps pain, even other people’s pain, becomes a smell you carry round with you? A”
― Pat Barker, Life Class

“If he’d learned nothing else at the Slade he’d learned that men and women could be friends, even intimate friends, without sex intruding.”
― Pat Barker, Life Class