Когда умирает человек, положено винить кого-то или что-то. Джимми Кросс это понимал. Можно винить войну. Можно винить идиотов, которые войну развязали. Можно винить Кайову за то, что на нее пошел. Мож...
When a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it, and hold it forever inaccessible. (I love...
They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to th...
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.
There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
Not a minister, he said, but I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, except there's still this sound...
It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.
It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable con...
It is easy, of course, to fear happiness. There is often complacency in the acceptance of misery. We fear parting from our familiar roles. We fear the consequences of such a parting. We fear happiness...
I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's, his nose was undamaged, ther...
He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone—riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafe...
He hated her. Yes, he did. He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.
Down inside, of course, I wasn't sure, and yet I had to see her one more time. What I needed, I suppose, was some sort of final confirmation, something to carry with me when she was gone.
But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rota...
But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems...
The object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination. To extend the boundaries of the mysterious. To p...
And when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by m...