The Silence of the Girls Quotes

“We’re going to survive–our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams–and in their worst nightmares too.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“I thought: Suppose, suppose just once, once, all these centuries, the slippery gods keep their word and Achilles is granted eternal glory in return for his early death under the walls of Troy...? What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won't want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won't want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they'll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles … How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Men carve meaning into women’s faces; messages addressed to other men.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“As later Priam comes secretly to the enemy camp to plead with Achilles for the return of his son Hector's body, he says: "'I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son."
Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: "And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Yes, the death of young men in battle is a tragedy - I’d lost four brothers, I didn’t need anybody to tell me that. A tragedy worthy of any number of laments - but theirs is not the worst fate. I looked at Andromache, who’d have to live the rest of her amputated life as a slave, and I thought: We need a new song. ”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“This is what free people never understand. A slave isn't a person who's being treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in anybody else's.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“The defeated go down in history and disappear, and their stories die with them.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Silence becomes a woman.' Every woman I’ve ever known was brought up on that saying.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“How do you separate a tiger's beauty from its ferocity? Or a cheetah's elegance from the speed of its attack? Achilles was like that -- the beauty and the terror were two sides of a single coin.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“[...] but perhaps no kindness was possible between owner and slave, only varying degrees of brutality?”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“I listened and let it soothe me, that ceaseless ebb and flow, the crash of the breaking waves, the grating sigh of its retreat. It was like lying on the chest of somebody who loves you, somebody you know you can trust—though the sea loves nobody and can never be trusted. I was immediately aware of a new desire, to be part of it, to dissolve into it: the sea that feels nothing and can never be hurt.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“he’s beginning to understand that grief doesn’t strike bargains. There’s no way of avoiding the agony—or even of getting through it faster. It’s got him in its claws and it won’t let go till he’s learnt every lesson it has to teach.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“They were men, and free. I was a woman, and a slave. And that’s a chasm no amount of sentimental chit-chat about shared imprisonment should be allowed to obscure.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“So many pebbles on that beach—millions—all of them worn smooth by the sea’s relentless grinding, but not this one. This one had stayed sharp.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“His idea of female beauty was a woman so fat if you slapped her backside in the morning she'd still be jiggling when you got back home for dinner.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“All Achilles’s emotions seemed to be varying shades of anger.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“We’re going to survive—our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams—and in their worst nightmares too.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“He shook his head. “It won’t always be like this.” “Oh, I think it might.” “No—honestly it won’t. Things do change. And if they don’t you bloody well make them.” “Spoken like a man.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Someone once said to me: You never mention his looks. And it's true, I don't, I find it difficult. At that time, he was probably the most beautiful man alive, as he was certainly the most violent, but that's the problem. How do you separate a tiger's beauty from its ferocity? Or a cheetah's elegance from the speed of the attack? Achilles was like that- the beauty and the terror were two sides of a single coin.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“She was like a windflower trembling on its slender stem, so fragile you feel it can’t possibly survive the blasts that shake it, though it survives them all.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“In later life, wherever I went, I always looked for the women of Troy who'd been scattered all over the Greek world. That skinny old woman with brown-spotted hands shuffling to answer her master's door, can that really be Queen Hecuba, who, as a young and beautiful girl, newly married, had led the dancing in King Priam's hall? Or that girl in the torn and shabby dress, hurrying to fetch water from the well, can that be one of Priam's daughters? Or the ageing concubine, face paint flaking over the wrinkles in her skin, can that really be Andromache, who once, as Hector's wife, stood proudly on the battlements of Troy with her baby son in her arms?”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Sometimes at night I lie awake and quarrel with the voices in my head.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Forget. So there was my duty laid out in front of me, as simple and clear as a bowl of water: Remember.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“in my experience men are curiously blind to aggression in women. They’re the warriors, with their helmets and armour, their swords and spears, and they don’t seem to see our battles—or they prefer not to. Perhaps if they realized we’re not the gentle creatures they take us for their own peace of mind would be disturbed?”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“You’re a monster, do you know that?” “Yes, oddly enough, I do.” He threw his arm across Patroclus’s shoulders. “Come on, let’s eat.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“I thought: And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brother.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“No one looks him in the face now, it's as if his grief frightens them. What are they afraid of? That one day they'll have to endure pain like this? Or that they never will, that they're incapable of it, because grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Nothing happened. Well, of course nothing happened! Isn't nothing what generally happens when you pray to the gods?”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls