But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.
A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
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...
The greater a man’s fear, the greater his potential courage.
Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
Money was never a problem, passports were never required. There were always new places to dance.
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,...
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 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?...
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....
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them f...
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...If the stakes eve...
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...
Продумывая детали, Уэйд неожиданно проникся новым, угрюмым сочувствием к отцу. Вот, значит, как оно было. Ходишь, делаешь свои дела. Несешь эту ношу, замуровываешь себя в молчание, прячешь адскую прав...
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity.
Mrs. Kooshof's intolerance for complexity, for the looping circuitry of a well-told tale, symptomizes an epidemic disease of our modern world. (I see it daily among my students. The short attention sp...
Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love. And it was real. When I write about her now, three decades later, it's tempting to dismiss it as a crush, an infatuation of childhood, but I know fo...
Kiowa who saw it happen said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something-Just Boom-then down. Not like in the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes a...
It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.