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 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 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.
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...
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)
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.
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...
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...
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 heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology.
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'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.
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...
By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like th...
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.
A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.
My sole fond memory from this period is of a rubbery little Appalachian number by the name of June. Acrobatic tongue. Tooth decay. Illiterate in everything but love.)