Lady Cynthia Asquith

“I use the word smile for lack of a better word, but how to convey the beauty of the indefinable expression that transfigured that time-worn face? Tender triumph: gentle joy: rapturous reverence. What mystery did I witness? It was like iron frost yielding to sunshine — the thawing of grief in the dawn-radiance of some unsurmisable redemption.”

“I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace. I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before. ... One will have to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones, and one will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war.”

“Oh why was I born for this time? Before one is thirty to know more dead than living people.”