Doris Lessing Quotes

War destroys people's souls. Most people focus on physical injuries, but the invisible injuries can take a lifetime to heal and affects the lives of generations to come.

I did not know that the wounds of war are often invisible.

When I was in the war, I was lucky that I was in a plane and never saw the carnage close-up.

Wars don't happen on battlefields; they go on happening in people's hearts for generations and generations, and the ecological damage is unfathomably complex and dire.

This gulf war syndrome thing is truly unfortunate, and I've met some of the vets who have this. These are my guys, and I feel terrible about it.

I've become very, very liberal as far as war is concerned. It's just too terrible. I've been to wars and I've seen what happens. I know what it is to be hurt, and it's nothing compared to these guys. To be blind for the rest of your life. To have prosthetic limbs.

No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation.

Grozny's been largely rebuilt. But at the same time, I think the war is very much being waged inside its survivors.

The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness.

Bad as was being shot by some of our own troops in the battle of the Wilderness, - that was an honest mistake, one of the accidents of war, - being shot at, since the war, by many officers, was worse.

When the peace treaty is signed, the war isn't over for the veterans, or the family. It's just starting.

I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.

If you are a real soldier, you never get over the war.

My father fought behind Japanese lines in the second world war and it traumatised him. Everybody who knew him from before said he was the life and soul of the party - fun to be with - but after the war he was different.

There's this romantic idea that's built up around war. But the pragmatic view is there are tons of people of my generation who have lost their lives, lost their marriages, or lost their health as a consequence of being sent to wars which could have been avoided.

I'd say my mother made more of a difference to me than anyone else did. I know that's a conventional and perhaps mundane answer, but my family was blown apart at the start of World War II.

In the end, they pardoned me and packed me off to a home for the shell-shocked. Shortly before the end of the war, I was discharged a second time, once again with the observation that I was subject to recall at any time.

I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.

Trauma is not the sole province of victims. If that were true, soldiers returning from Afghanistan wouldn't suffer from PTSD.

I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't.

Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.

Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

The lives of prisoners of war after they are returned is almost never discussed, never explored.

I was one of those children forced into fighting at the age of 13, in my country Sierra Leone, a war that claimed the lives of my mother, father and two brothers. I know too well the emotional, psychological and physical burden that comes with being exposed to violence as a child or at any age for that matter.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.