Regeneration - Pat Barker Quotes

Regeneration Quotes

“Can you imagine what … the Director of Medical Services is going to say, when he finds out we’re sheltering “conchies” as well as cowards, shirkers, scrimshakers and degenerates?” p. 4

“The only way I can get publicity is to make them court martial me” – Sassoon p.6

“In the end I didn’t know if I was trying to kill them, or just giving them plenty of opportunities to kill me.” Sassoon – p.11

“When I woke up the nightmares didn’t always stop…the pavement was covered in corpses…people were treading on their faces.” – Sassoon p.12

“You don’t think it’s possible to write a good poem in a state of shock?” Rivers à Sassoon p. 13

“The point is, you hate civilians don’t you?” Rivers à Sassoon p. 14

“Me trying to stop the war was a bit like trying to stop the ship would have been… a little figure jumping up and down, waving its arms.” - Sassoon  p.15

“They had the sense to get him out of the room.” P.17

“Perhaps the most distressing feature of his case was the occasional glimpse of the cheerful and likeable young man he must’ve once been.” P.18

“He’s been thrown into the air … and had landed, head-first, on a German corpse, whose gas-filled belly had ruptured on impact.” P.19

“Burns…hardly looked like a human being at all. His body seemed to have become merely the skin-and-bone casing for a tormented alimentary canal.” P. 19

“His suffering was without purpose or dignity.” P.19

“My God…Thank God” Sassoon and Graves p. 20 (casual blasphemy)

 “The silence deepened, like a fall of snow, accumulating second by second, flake by flake, each flake by itself inconsiderable, until everything is transformed.” P. 22

“One young man was sympathetic, the other two…I got the impression they didn’t believe in shell-shock at all …it was just cowardice.” Graves about the men on the board p.22

“When you put the uniform, in effect you sign a contract…in the end you do the job …that way you gsin more respect.” P. 23

“In his case it was motivated less by a desire to save his own sanity [but to] convince civilians that the war was mad.” P.26

“It is possible someone might find being locked up in a loony bin a fairly emasculating experience.”  p.29

“[Rivers] was used to be adopted as a father figure.” P.34

“You don’t think being safe whilst other people die rather difficult?”
Nobody else in this stinking country seems to find it difficult.” Rivers q. àSassoon p.36

“A branch rattled along the windows with a sound like machine-gun fire, and he had to bite his lips to stop himself from crying out.”  - Sassoon p.37

“He looked around the circle of his companions. Now they could dissolve into the earth like they were meant to do. He felt a great urge to lie down with them.” – Burns p.39

“Only the young soldier home on leave, staggering…