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.
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...
Bir şeyi taşımak, sırtlamak demekti; Üsteğmen Jimmy Cross'un Martha'ya olan aşkını tepeler ve bataklıklar boyunca sırtlaması gibi. Geçişsiz kullanıldığında yürümek anlamına gelirdi, fakat bunun ötesin...
Ölebilecek adamların bütün duygusal yükünü taşırlardı. Elem, dehşet, sevgi, özlem - soyut şeylerdi bunlar, fakat soyut şeylerin de somut bir ağırlığı vardı. Utanç verici anılar taşırlardı. Zor zapt ed...
You're never more alive than when you're almost dead.
People who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead.
You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come hom...
What happened, and what might have happened?
Well, right now I'm 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. [...] An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everyt...
Twenty years. A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.
They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it...they died so as not to die of embarrassment...they were too frightened to be cowards. (p 20-21 TTTC)
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...
Oh, man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker, Azar said. You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like Shredded fuckin' WheatGo away, Kiowa said.I'm just saying the truth. Lik...
It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.
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...
I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, enveloping and destroying those malignancies that w...
He hated her. Yes, he did. He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.
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...
Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.
CEASE FIRE,' Captain Johansen shouted. 'Cease fire, what's wrong with you guys? Stop wasting the goddamn ammo. CEASE FIRE!'Cease fire,' the lieutenants hollered.Cease fire,' the platoon sergeants holl...