Women are amazing. You can wait for months, travel thousands of kilometers, and build up ineffable desire. They just brush their hair.
An ancient mustiness padded the air, tinged with with an acrid scent-a trace of the war between paper and oxygen, played out in slow inexorable burn that would one day crumble this empire to dust." -page 62
If my legs get blown off in war, I’d like to have them replaced with a coffee table. Half man/half furniture, I’ll be in the living room if you need me.
Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults.
To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we "know" that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.
I think it was C.S. Lewis that asked, 'Do not most people simply drift away?'. I've always been a reader and for the longest time that stuck with me because I was at war with it. How can people 'simply' drift away?
I turned the page in Slaughterhouse Five, a forbidden book at Belmont because we were too young to read about soldiers swearing and bombs dropping and bodies blowing up and war sucking.
For real men serve their country with random acts of kindness, not vicious acts of violence. And real soldiers have one duty, and one duty only; they have a duty to mutiny!
But don't they say that all is fair in love and war? I heard that somewhere." "'They?' Who are 'they?'" "I don't know. Just people." "That's what the victorious claim, not the defeated; the powerful, not the powerless. 'All is fair.' 'The end justifi...
This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.
Borkin: Ladies and gentlemen, why are you so glum? Sitting there like a jury after it's been sworn in! ... Let's think up something. What would you like? Forfeits, tug of war, catch, dancing, fireworks?
I had a dream about you. We couldn't decide on a sunrise. You wanted a tan, I only cared about the view. Then World War III fulfilled both our desires.
Bobby Tom told me he’s not afraid of the Chargers’ defense.” “Bobby Tom’ll tell you he’s not afraid of nuclear war, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in his opinion.
Look, this is helping me out quite a bit, but could you just get to the punishment part? We're at the end of World War Two in history, and I can't wait to find out who wins.
My dad once told me that his biggest challenge after returning from Vietnam had been coming to terms with his own callousness. He’d made a deal with the war and traded his humanity for a ticket home.
The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.
I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath." the Great Comanche war chief, Ten Bears
Though there had yet to be a victor in this great war that had begun almost three years ago, Maurice had written to her that they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. Freedom to think hopefully of the future.
It is a basic idea of practically every war mythology that the enemy is a monster and that in killing him one is protecting the only truly valuable order of human life on earth, which is that, of course, of one's own people.
When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war.
Before I met the Jesuits, I’d never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics.