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...
If a story seems moral, do not believe it.
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...
Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.
Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused s...
Can a word stop your heart as surely as arsenic?
At what point, he asked, does one decide on rafters and a rope? Answer: no points to be had. There is merely what happened, what is now happening and what will one day happen. Do we choose sleep? Hell...
When you're dead, you just have to be yourself.
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.
War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it w...
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...
I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like . . . I don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading.
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...
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles...
If you weren't humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any n...
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.
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.
He killed me at the Scrabble board, barely concentrating, and on those occasions when speech was necessary he had a way of compressing large thoughts into small, cryptic packets of language.
Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.