The Ugliness of War

"...I hate the whole thin - the horror, the pain, the ugliness. War isn't a khaki uniform or a drill parade - everything I've read in old histories haunts me. I lie awake at night and see things that have happened - see the blood and filth and misery of it all. And a bayonet charge! If I could face the other things I could never face that. It turns me sick to think of it - sicker even to think of giving it than receiving it - to think of thrusting a bayonet through another man."

~ Walter Blythe

Pain and Death

"I don't think I'm afraid of death itself - it's of the pain that might come before death - it wouldn't be so bad to die and have it over - but to keep on dying!"

~ Walter Blythe

Truth

"Well, if you won't accept Tennyson as an authority, perhaps you will believe the words of a Greater than he. 'Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.' I believe that, Anne, with all my heart. It's the greatest and grandest verse in the Bible - or in any literature - and the truest, if there are comparative degrees of trueness. And it's the first duty of a man to tell the truth, as he sees it and believes it."

~ Gilbert Blythe

Enjoyment

"It's been by experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will."

~ Anne Shirley