The greater a man’s fear, the greater his potential courage.
That's a true story that never happened.
Sert bir dil kullanırlardı o korkunç yumuşaklığı kapsayabilmek için. Nallandı derlerdi. Göçtü, işerken şişlendi. Acımasızlık değildi, sahne duruşuydu sadece. Oyuncuydular. Biri öldüğünde tam ölmek gib...
Imagination, like reality, has its limits.
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...
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 this, too, was a performance.
When you're dead, you just have to be yourself.
Каждый держался, как умел. Иной принимал рассеянно-пренебрежительный вид, иной прикрывался напускной гордостью, другие солдатской выправкой или ненужным рвением. Они боялись смерти, еще больше боялись...
Если ты хочешь помочь твоему ветерану, избегай церквей, приписывающих зло потусторонним силам – например, дьяволу, соблазняющему людей или вселяющемуся в них. Дело, в частности, в том, что, представля...
Делать обобщения относительно войны - все равно, что делать обобщения относительно мира. Почти все правда. Почти все вымысел. Странность войны в том, что вы никогда не будете живы больше, чем когда на...
They didn’t know the first thing about Diem’s tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalism, or the long colonialism of the French—this was all too damned complicated, it required some reading—but...
There were red checkers and black checkers. The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on th...
The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar last names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but...
The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, repaying itself over and over.
Still there was so much to say. How the rain never stopped. How the cold worked into your bones. Sometimes the bravest thing on earth was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones. Cour...
She'd say amazing things sometimes. Once you're alive, she'd say, you can't ever be dead.
Mitchell sanders was sitting under a banyan tree and using a thumbnail to pry off all the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing them in a USO envelope. When he was done he sealed the envelop...
Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love...it had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet f...
It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I cou...