14 Quotes & Sayings By Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon was a British poet and soldier during World War I. He was a member of the elite "Pals Battalion," also known as the "Terrible Battalion," which fought at the Battle of the Somme on the Western Front in 1916. He was wounded six times, received three Distinguished Service Orders, and was twice mentioned in dispatches. After the war, Sassoon became a notable anti-war socialist leader Read more

He also became a prolific writer of poems and prose, including some of the most controversial writing of the period.

Mute in that golden silence hung with green, Come down...
1
Mute in that golden silence hung with green, Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes Remembrance of all beauty that has been, And stillness from the pools of Paradise. Siegfried Sassoon
I didn't want to die - not before I'd finished...
2
I didn't want to die - not before I'd finished reading The Return of the Native anyhow. Siegfried Sassoon
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier...
3
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go." "The War Poems Siegfried Sassoon
I believe that this war, upon which I entered as...
4
I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. Siegfried Sassoon
The fact is that five years ago I was, as...
5
The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so. Siegfried Sassoon
6
But I've grown thoughtful now. And you have lost Your early-morning freshness of surprise At being so utterly mine: you've learned to fear The gloomy, stricken places in my soul, And the occasional ghosts that haunt my gaze. Siegfried Sassoon
7
Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled. Siegfried Sassoon
8
I did not dread the dark winter as people do when they have lost their youth and live alone in some great city. Siegfried Sassoon
9
The phrase "after-life" was also vaguely confused with going to church and not wanting to be dead - a perplexity which can be omitted from a narrative in which I am doing my best to confine myself to actual happenings. At the age of twenty-two I believed myself to be unextinguishable. Siegfried Sassoon
10
All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities. Siegfried Sassoon
11
All this, I suspect, has been little more than the operation known as the pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, but I have had a comfortable feeling that, however ordinary my enterprises may have been, they had at any rate the advantage of containing, for me, an element of sustained unfamiliarity. I am one of those persons who begin life by exclaiming they've "never seen anything like this before" and die in the hope that they may say the same of heaven. Siegfried Sassoon
12
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. Siegfried Sassoon
13
Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows. Siegfried Sassoon