Jacqueline Winspear Quotes

if the way ahead is not clear, time is often the best editor of one's intentions.

Yes, it does make the load rather heavy if you carry tools for every eventuality.

What does anyone really know about the impetus to go to war? And so much is uncovered in hindsight. And there are aspects of even past wars that are only coming out now. Historians discover letters here, notes there, and look very carefully at different aspects of not only any conflict but any great historical event.

Because, we assume, these days, you just get in a car, you turn the key, and woosh, you're up the road. Or even now, dare I say, you don't turn a key; you get in a car and you're up the road. And yet with this particular car, it was a five-step process to start it. So how do I let the reader know that?

in this great war [WWI] ... they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. The freedom to think hopefully of the future.

But to some extent, the whole aspect of Fascism was a real hot potato. Because so many of the aristocracy were enamored of the tenets of not only fascism but also of Adolf Hitler himself. And you know, that was treading on a lot of toes.

a question has the most power before we rush to answer it, when it is still making us think, still testing us.

As Churchill said about the Great War, and he said this in about 1924, that it was the first war in which man realized that he could obliterate himself completely. If you consider the way the whole world was impacted, 18 million people worldwide died, and that is taking into account military and civilian deaths: 18 million people. And it was the whole world, if you will. You know, many of those trenches were dug by Chinese. There are photographs of Chinese looking like they just came from China, with their hats and so on, digging the trenches, right from the beginning.

Never judge a journey by the distance.

What's interesting to me, is a moving someone through time; in a way, history is part of my landscape. And it fascinates me that history can be so easily reflected in what happens today.

Im a storyteller; that is what I do. And Im particularly interested in history; and in history of a certain era. But what is interesting for me is how many, how many things you see repeated.

It's really important in any historical fiction, I think, to anchor the story in its time. And you do that by weaving in those details, by, believe it or not, by the plumbing.

She had always told herself that she did hti job because she wanted to help others; afterall, hadn't Maurice told her once that the most important question any individual could ask was, "How might I serve?" If her response to that question had been pure, surely she would have coninued with the calling to be a nurse.... But that role hadn't been quite enough for her. She would have missed the excitement, the thrill when she embarked on the work of collecting clues to support a case.

David Corbett's The Art of Character offers a deep inquiry into the creation of character for the novice writer, with valuable nuggets of wisdom for the seasoned storyteller. If you are a writer, it should be on your desk.

Stay with the question. The more it troubles you, the more it has to teach you.

I often think it would be really interesting to take all of those who would wage war to the battlefield cemeteries, and say, explain yourself to the dead. Explain yourself to the dead!

It was Harry Patch, who was the last living World War I veteran; and by veteran I mean someone who actually fought in the war, he didn't just happen to be in the army at that time, in the Great War. And when the Iraq War started, he was interviewed, and they said, well what do you think of this? And he said, in a very sad voice, "Well, that's why my mates died. We thought we were going to end all that sort of thing."

It is indeed a wondrous universal alchemy, is it not? When one's heartfelt intentions cause mountains to move.

only when we have a respect for time will we have learned something of the art of living.

If you look at the First World War, the Kaiser was actually, actively buying a lot of the armaments from Britain! in the years, in the run-up to the First World War. And I mean, there was a connection there. He was, indeed, Queen Victoria's grandson. You know, they were all related, all these royal families.

Most people don't realize that they feel something is wrong before they think something is wrong.

I think that one of the things that we all ask ourselves, whoever we are, is: who stands to make a lot of money out of this [wars]? And, certainly, it comes back to people like armaments makers, and so on and so forth.