I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I...
I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows... Or it would be fine to confirm the odd beliefs about war: it's horrible, but it's a crucible of...
I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope....
He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around (p89 Sweetheart of Son...
Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has. Look at Woody Allen's funny movies - all the humor comes out of sad stuff. Sometimes you have to laugh, no matter what life...
То, что Джон Уэйд пошел на войну, было заложено в природе любви. Не ради того он пошел, чтобы гробить других или себя, не ради того, чтобы быть хорошим гражданином, или героем, или человеком нравствен...
Общим был груз их памяти. Одни несли то, на что не хватало сил у других. Бывало, несли друг друга, если кто-нибудь был ранен или выбивался из сил. Переносили недомогания.
What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty.
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.
They were afraid of dieing, but they were even more afraid to show it.
The days seemed to stretch out toward infinity, blank and humid, without purpose, and at night I was kept awake by the endless drone of mosquitoes and helicopters. (Why wars must be contested under su...
Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are.
Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules...
Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of that summer didn’t happen in some other dimension, a place where your life exists before you’ve lived it, and where it goes afterwa...
It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know. Norman Bowker leaned back and considered what he might’ve said on the subject. He knew shit. It was his specialt...
I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.
I learned that words make a difference. It's easier to cope with a kicked bucked than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead.
I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology.
He'd been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spring the spring wasn't there, but it could be recoiled.
He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important.