Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.
War - the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.
The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain.
I don't care if your the President of the United States, the Queen of England, the inventor of the microchip, a bankable movie star, or an ordinary Joe or Jill, you're no paragon in my book, but the s...
We had survived, but in war, a man does not have to be killed or wounded to become a casualty. His life, his sight, or limbs are not the only things he stands to lose.
What finger-shaped Florida lacks in breadth it makes up for in length; Tallahassee is 480 miles from Miami (farther than New York City is from Cleveland). The
The total distance—11,741 miles—gave me sticker shock. Round it up to twelve thousand. Almost halfway around the world! It seemed slightly mad, but then it might do me good. To make such an epic road...
Key West has become an imitation of its former self,
Key West has become an imitation of its former self, its eccentricities commoditized for sale to tourists. That character you see with a parrot on his shoulder is about as authentic as vinyl siding, e...
Dog Soldier Raid at New Scandinavia—1869,
Directly overhead the Milky Way was as distinct as a highway across the sky. The constellations shown brilliantly, except the north, where they were blurred by the white sheets of the Aurora. Now shim...
Uniforms
I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring. Had it not been for the fea...
Aside from their companionship, I’d brought Sage and Sky as ambassadors, hoping they would attract attention and open the door to conversations with strangers. In a moment, they fulfilled their diplom...
The plotting he’d had to do to come to this point had exhausted Kidman’s capacity for calculation; his natural, impulsive violence was regaining the upper hand.
The beaver dam had been constructed on the ruins of a man-made one, built by the CCC back in the thirties and later dynamited by an irate Finn who'd objected to the government's meddling with nature.
I really believe that when we start talking ourselves back, we'll have more to offer the world. he [Woodenkinfe] said. I don't want a gray world.You mean taking back our cultures and where we come fro...
With the great love of the unknown and vast dreams of dominion and power,
Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself, and the way it preserves itself is to keep you from having any doubts, and the way it keeps you from do...
Someone had told me, years ago, that Key West’s latitude was the northernmost from which the Southern Cross was visible. I had glimpsed it just once, in 1980, while on a night swordfishing trip in the...