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

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

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

I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insecurities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

— Siegfried Sassoon

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

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

I didn't want to die - not before I'd finished reading The Return of the Native anyhow.

— Siegfried Sassoon

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

Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.

— Siegfried Sassoon

Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.

— Siegfried Sassoon