What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.'Daddy,...
I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.
There should be a law, I though. If you support a war, if you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you he to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook u...
Psychology—that was one thing I knew. You don't try to scare people in broad daylight. You wait. Because the darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imaginat...
They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge un...
I was a coward. I went to the war.
You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurre...
Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor.
Beyond
Why do we care about Lizzie Borden, or Judge Crater, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Little Big Horn?Mystery!Because of all that cannot be known. And what if we did know? What if it were proved—absolutel...
It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast silent vacuum where there were no burdens a...
A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.
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 saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression?...
It was the burden of being alive. Awkwardly, the men would reassemble themselves, first in private, then in groups, becoming soldiers again. They would repair the leaks in their eyes. They would check...
All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit.
The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.
It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.
In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end,...
How crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead
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