Daphne du Maurier Quotes

I don't write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.

I was drafted into the Army when I was 19 and came out at age 22. Most people that I knew didn't think they'd come home alive. I didn't think I would either, so I was happy when I did.

When I look back on my childhood, I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.

There is no French town in which the wounds inflicted on the battle-field are not bleeding.

Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously into a hole.

War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death.

The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

I find period pieces really difficult to get my head around. How can we know what it must have been like to be in Nazi Germany in 1944? The reality weighs on me because I feel like you want to try and honor what happened, but how can you truly know? I have never lived in a war or lost anyone.

You must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your King, and you must treat every Frenchman as if he were the Devil himself.

I came from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its wreckage and terrible ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamour for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or son of some poor widow away off in some modest community, or perhaps the scion of a great family, who will have to do the fighting.

Sweet Jesus, war does terrible things to people.

I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.

You know why we're good at it? Because we get a lot of practice. This country is only 200 years old, and already we've had ten major wars. We average a major war every twenty years. So we're good at it!

I would like my book to give people insight to the war before and after, but I don't think anyone could read my book and suddenly make up her mind about the war. I want to write for everybody.

The more I've traveled to war zones, the more I'm convinced that the impact and the effects are way beyond anything we can even begin to imagine.

I was after a set of pictures, so that when people looked at them they would say, ‘This is war’-that the people who were in the war would believe that I had truthfully captured what they had gone through I worked in the framework that war is horrible. I want to carry on what I have tried to do in these pictures. War is a concentrated unit in the world and these things are clearly and cleanly seen. Things like race prejudice, poverty, hatred and bigotry are sprawling things in civilian life, and not so easy to define as war.

Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don't get that experience, but suddenly in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror - but, by God, you are alive.

Wars shatter so many lives. I think especially of children robbed of their childhood.

Nationalism stems from catastrophes, whether they are caused by earthquakes or lost wars.

I had a nice childhood. War and all the experiences affected me as a person and helped me to grow, to change.

La guerre, la guerre, everything la guerre. That's how I grew up. So for me, it's real. It's not something in the past.

I've been to war. I've raised twins. If I had a choice, I'd rather go to war.

Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony; I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you've never heard it.