Birdsong Quotes- Part 4 France 1917

"his intrest had slackened when he saw the answer: that there were no boundries they would not cross, no limits to what they could endure"

"They were built to endure and resist"

"he himself did not feel hardened or strengthened by what he had seen; he felt impoverished and demeaned"

"did not bring back any sense of belonging"

"Everyone's doing their bit, you know"

"locked on to Weir as though he depended on him for some quality he lacked"

"Most people in this war want to survive so that we can win it. We are fighting for our country"

"I would especially like a five-day bombardment on their street"

"If I am fighting on behalf of anyone, I think it is for those who have died"

"I heard the sound of my own life leaving me"

"the fossil shape of a bird, a pterodactyle ribbed in limestone"

"there are things better left undone or unsaid"

"Isabelle was injured, but she was lucky"

"He felt quite cold, as though this were a routine matter, like a trench inspection"

"But I was saved by the war"

"He seemed a man removed to some new existence where he was dug in and fortified by his lack of natural feeling or response"

"You're tired in your mind"

"I've learned to love the rule book, to be bloodthirsty in the way it perscribes"

"But somehow there is a propriety. It sounds strange, but we have degraded human life so far that we must leave some space for dignity to grow again. As it may, one day. Not for you or me, but for our children"

"I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine"

"he had forseen the numbers of the dead. It was not a premonition, more a recognition, he told himself, that the difference between death and life was not one of fact but merely of time"

"They had not been there for the great slaughters of the previous year and could not forsee the mechanized abattoir that was expected in the impassable mud of Flanders in the months to come"

"The moved with a grim, automatic strength. They were frightening to the civilians beacuse they had evolved not into killers but into passive beings whose only aim was to endure"

"his presence was a matter not just of indifference"

"nothing ws immoral or beyond redemption"

"Nothing in the world is conventional at the moment"

"Do you think my life was made for this?"

"**** off, Weir, **** off out of my way and leave me alone"

"His renewed love of the world made the prospect of leaving it unbearable"

"The ground began to move and disgorge men"

"how dry and passionless his own style had become"

"Yet he had loved him. Weir alone had made the war bearable. Weir's terror under the guns had been a conductor for his own fear"

"You can't give tin stars to people when there are men who gave their lives"

"he feared that the reality he now inhabited was very fragile"

"His life became grey and thin, like a light that might at any moment be extinguished; it was filled with quietness"