Quotes by Matthew De Abaitua

Who desired the Great War? No nation benefitted from it. The war brought about the destruction of the Prussian Empire, stripped the British Empire of its ability to hold its colonies, slaughtered the French and starved Germany, inspired a revolution in Russia, and prepared the ground for a more terrible slaughter to come. The great powers didn’t want a war and they certainly didn’t need one. But their people wanted a war. To the surprise of the rulers across the Allies and the Central Powers, the idea of war was seized by the people of every nation.

I’m not afraid of anything and I will not fight.

Losing him would, she realised, be unlike anything she had ever experienced before. A marriage is a conspiracy, a shared aspect toward the rest of the society, a code devised over a long history of negotiation and habit. That code would vanish. Her thoughts would be unobserved, her memories would be hers alone, without the heft that comes from sharing them with another. She would become insubstantial to herself.

Kindness is not entered onto the great ledger of civilisation.

Horror is the awakening of repressed knowledge, something that you have known all along but kept at the periphery of awareness so that life can go on.

Humans make tools. Some animals make tools too. The making and using of tools is important for developing language, how we think and speak. If we do not make anything, it affects our thinking.

Her self lagged behind her anger, like a mother picking up after a destructive child.

If you said to me, “I do not love, I have never loved,” then you would sound incomplete. Equally, if you say “I do not hate, I have never hated,” then you sound like half a man.

Exhaustion is a thin blanket tattered with bullet holes.

The devil steps up to the podium, clears his throat and taps out time with his baton: in come the monstrous iron kettle drums of artillery, joined by a woodwind section of whistling bullets and shrieking shells, the ever-crackling light percussion of rifle fire.

It is in his obsessions that mankind most closely resembles his machines.