Vespers in Vienna Quotes

“That's just the trouble really. Nobody's shocked by anything anymore; we're not shocked by deceit, cruelty, lust for power, faithlessness, money-grubbing. Indeed, we accept it as inevitable that each and every one of our fellow men should be impelled only by selfishness. Well, sir, let me say that it's stupid of us not to be shocked, because the continuation of our civilisation depends precisely upon our ability to be shocked.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Now look here, colonel. Of course, I know you chaps have got your orders and all that sort of thing and that you're not supposed to mix with us in case we corrupt your Marxian souls with the impurities of our bourgeois conceptions; but you ought to know as well as I do that that's all tommy faddle. How the hell are we going to plan a peace if we don't attempt to understand one another? Of course, if you've got definite orders not to drink with me personally, then I quite understand; but let me tell you this one thing: that it doesn't prevent my liking you as a man and you can tell that to your general if you like.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Communists cannot possibly do without God what Christians have failed to do with God.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Nobody said much after that, although they sat on for a little exchanging banalities, Colonel Nicobar, who owed loyalty to the sprawl of a tired Empire, the Russian colonel, who owed loyalty to the new terror, and the three nuns, who owed loyalty to Christ, Who had so often been betrayed. Watching the quick way they comprehended one another when they spoke of trivial things, Colonel Nicobar wondered if it was indeed possible for them to share philosophy as they shared the wind, the rain, and the stars, which was the common finger of God upon them. Outside the hoot of an engine sounded far away behind the Wiener Wald and made the colonel think of his childhood, when he had listened from a tucked-in bed to the rattle of railway trucks in a darkness which Jesus made safe.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Perhaps some of them chose Schwester Kasimira's way, glorying in their discomfort because they knew that Jesus Christ hadn't stayed at the Ritz either. Perhaps there were unknown saints, Saint Ignatius Loyolas queuing at bus stops and Saint Augustines of Hippo giving up their seats on the tram. The thought made him briefly happy, seeming consecrate some of the aridity of his soldiering.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“It must be difficult for a Latin mind, even when illumined by the Holy Ghost, to accept hordes of non-practising Presbyterian highlanders, copulating G.I.s, and predatory Russians as more adequately defending Christian civilisation than the millions of Catholics who had fought against them.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Perhaps, though, as a Catholic padre had once suggested to him, the Italians would have been even more ignoble if they had been Methodists.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“In all groups and assemblies of men there are good and there are bad men. It is unprofitable to generalize. There are good Russians and bad Russians just as there are good Germans and bad Germans and good Englishmen and bad Englishmen. I mean that the distribution of what Reverend Mother Auxilia would call the grace of God cannot be charted geographically.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Please do not be misunderstanding me. The soldier who fights and drinks too much and makes love to pretty girls is an unhappy man, and he liked Jesus Christ and all that he has said, but he often is not liking very much those who say that they speak in His Name.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“When we were fighting the war we were told that we were doing right, but that we have lost it, we are told that we have been doing wrong. We are wanting to know why.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Every little betrayal, every little rhyming of conviction and convenience, every little selfishness, every little preference of immediate comfort to ultimate good hastens the coming of the next war.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Sometimes I think that the only way to unite the nations of the world would be for the earth to be attacked by Mars. We'd all love each other like hell then.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Young woman, I think that there are at least two things more irritating than a lighter which won't work in a train on a long journey. One of them's being disembowelled by the Gestapo, and the other's being talked at by you.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“You see, sir, politics have changed since before the war. Before the war the reds were seditious and the blacks and the whites were loyal, but now the reds have won the war and so they're loyal and the blacks and the whites are seditious, and now we've got to stamp out their political opinions, although we've still got to respect them, too, because that's democracy.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“She cannot be allowed to go on staying in Rome, exercising what you of all people ought to know are subversive activities. Just imagine for a moment what might happen to the world if she succeeded in getting the Pope to make some great galumping statement which would make the Russians religious. Stalin would never forgive us.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“So this is what life is really about, Twingo thought as he listened, living and dying unto God. He had seen men die on the battlefield, torn apart in a burst of entrails, and God hadn't seemed to have much to do with it, but Schwester Kasimira, reading away holy German words out of her big book, seemed to know that even those untidy deaths had been died unto God.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Even after he had met Maria, life hadn't been much about God, but only about Maria herself and kissing her under the brim of her wide white hat; but now that she lay there dying because she hadn't wanted to go back to Russia, the world was all about God and he didn't think Schwester Kasimira and the nuns silly any longer.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Jesus Christ has spoken very long ago, and in simple words of meaning that could not possibly be misunderstood, unless, Herr Oberst, they were wilfully misunderstood. The words have gone out to the ends of the earth, Herr Oberst, ringing like bells across mountains and snows and rivers, telling man that whatsoever he would that men should do to him, that he should do to them, and calling upon him to love the Lord his God with his whole heart and with his whole mind, and his neighbor as himself. And in order that there should be no excuse for men not understanding, God has been allowing this lesson of love to be expressed also by the prophets of the less true religions of India and Japan and China, showing men how they might be saved from themselves not only in the next world, but in this.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“The colonel thought, as he had thought in Cologne after the last war, how, when you saw them with their faces growing out of their clothes, little different those who had fought for the wrong looked from those who had fought for the right and how the hair grew in the same way on the heads of the sons of Belial as on the heads of the sons of God. Beside the great round wheel of a lorry a British and a German soldier were showing each other photographs of their families, jerking with their thumbs the syntax of understanding.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“The colonel had better reason than the brigadier for knowing that the Russians were hunky-dory, for once, in Jugoslavia, he had watched a Soviet division capture in a few hours from the Germans a bridge which the 386th Division could not have taken in under a week. Down the hill those flaxen-haired boys had marched, laughing and singing, and the bullets had come tearing at them, smashing their tibias, cracking their femurs, opening their bellies, gouging their eyes, grounding them, scorching them. As, through his field-glasses, the colonel had watched them swept from the bridge into the river, it had not seemed to him that they could really be suffering, as he himself had suffered in 1914, with the big angry red thing up against him, and he had to make and effort of will to understand that each of these boys had died his own death, smash up against the Christ he didn't believe in, with his bowels gushing out over his boots as he thought for the last time of his mother, and with his hair still young in the sun. And still others had come on, laughing and singing, as they marched to kill and to be killed by other boys with lineless faces, because it was sweet and decorous to die for one's country. Yes, the Russians were hunky-dory all right, provided they were fighting on the same side as you were.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“It's a nonsense to say that men should be Britons and Frenchmen and Russians first and communists and Christians and fascists afterwards, for it is only by making a philosophy and not a nation prevail that we shall every attain universal peace. That's why this war's decided nothing, really, because it was fought for national survival and not for philosophical penetration.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“I think nuns are fun. I had a friend who was at a convent once, and really she said it was wizard and that the nuns were frightfully broadminded and allowed her to make up as much as she wanted to and have masses of boy friends call and take her out, but of course, she was Church of England really.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“The statue was a statue of the Sacred Heart, and it wasn't a very beautiful one either, but that didn't make Schwester Kasimira want to replace it by a stag's head, because she thought that the Lord was beautiful enough as He was, and that statues at best were only approximations, and even if they were ugly, they did point the way to heaven, and that was more than could be said of cinema houses and advertisements which were generally much uglier still and rarely, in her opinion, made any sense at all.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“They followed her, walking supererogatively on tiptoe, as though afraid to awaken the saints in whom they had never believed.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“I think that the trouble of the world is this: It has never been easy to obey our Lord's commands, not even in the days when all Europeans were Christians, and did not imagine that, just because they could see planets and stars and the moon at the end of a telescope, Christ had not died for their sins and risen from the dead. That was, my colonel, the great disservice your nineteenth-century materialists did to the world: to make it more difficult to obey the Lord. For there are two ways in which men and women obey the Lord: the first is because of love, and the second is because of fear, and always more have obeyed because of the second reason than because of the first.

The people who formerly obeyed because of love still obey from love, but those who used to obey because of what they were afraid was going to happen to them in the next world if they didn't, no longer do so, because the clever men have told them that the next world does not exist and that consequently after death there is neither reward of virtue nor chastisement of sin. You may not perhaps think that these things are very important, but if you wish to save European civilisation, you will be foolish not to think so.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Do you know, sometimes when I think of the unhappiness of the world, I wonder if priests and nuns are not greatly responsible for men and women not listening and not obeying more. You see, we have such a very wonderful thing to say and we say it so badly. Shall I tell you a truth? Sometimes when I read holy papers I feel like becoming a little worldly myself, because of the big phrases in which big truths are stated. For big truths are most powerful in little phrases -- but there I go preaching again, and committing the sin of spiritual pride as well, because I don't express our Lord's wisdom very wisely myself.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“The colonel mustn't really mind the Army being a topsy-turvy place because the Church was often a topsy-turvy place as well, with curates and chaplains often holier than canons and bishops, but of course that wasn't quite the same, because the Lord was there to guide the Church, and although she didn't want to be rude, she didn't think that He had always guided the army in quite the same way.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Herr Oberst, if you were one of my nuns, I should order you under holy obedience to hurt my feelings. As you are not a nun, however, I can only request you to hurt them.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“At first Rumania may have been just a little neutral against the Allies, but that was because the rogues who governed her did not understand the 'brincibles' of democracy, but by the end of the war, although she was too small country to make spectacular gestures, Rumania was being very neutral against Germany.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“The thought had then occurred to her that, as it was no longer easy to be prayerful in a world which had divorced pleasure from God, there was only one solution left and that was to be gay in a convent.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna