Edmund Blunden

“Each man sings, and tells his story.”

“I am for the woods against the world, but are the woods for me?”

“Never was such a sudden calm, such a transcendent silence; it was a minute to hold one's breath.”

“War was a bloody, dirty, trivial business, a series of scuffles for muddy ditches.”

“The long war had ended, but the armies of the dead were not disbanded.”

“God is an overwhelming responsibility.”

“The music of the English countryside is not to be slighted, but it is not easily shared.”

“Poetry is the sister of sorrow. Every man that suffers and weeps is a poet.”

“The seasons are my friends.”

“We had found a new religion, and its name was Comradeship.”

“Cricket to us was more than play, it was a worship in the summer sun.”

“History is a pageant, not a philosophy.”

“The scent of the trench, that complex of stale cigarette-smoke, mud, chloride of lime and corpse.”

“A man does not know what he is until he is tested.”

“I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest joy of the mind was in creation.”