This helpful war. It makes us better people and then it tries to kill us.
What’s he like?” “Thoughtful. Interesting. Compassionate.” “These are English words for ugly.
They spoke of small things at first, since it was best, when reattaching threads, to begin with the easiest knots.
Look at us, won’t you? We are nation of glorious cowards, ready to battle any evil but our own.
I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season.
If you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone’s life, why should you care about their sadness?
Perhaps this was what love was like after all- not the lurch of going over a humpback bridge, and not the incandescence of fireworks, just the quiet understanding that one should take a kind hand when it was offered, before all light was gone from the sky.
The heart was a bicameral thing, both stoical and skittish. Who was to say that it mightn’t endure the years of separation and the abrupt reversals of fate, only to be repulsed by a misaligned vase, by a lipsticked tooth, by a hundredth of an ounce of ash?
You are a mousetrap of a friend, all soft cheese and hard springs.
The young see the world that they wish for. The old see the world as it is. You.
One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to.
The true moments of one’s life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronized with the ordinary: with rail timetables, with breaks in traffic.
This was always my trouble when I was learning to speak your language. Every word can defend itself. Just when you go to grab it, it can split into two separate meanings so the understanding closes on empty air. I admire you people. You are like sorcerers and you have made your language as safe as your money.
Who knows which takes more courage – to die in battle, or to live in vain? It cuts all of us in two, I suppose.” Hamilton.
Perhaps this was what it was to grow up: this realization that the world was already staffed with people and that one was not particularly needed. She.
After the war of course it will be like the start of spring, which is always so brilliantly sudden. The leaves will burst back onto the trees and close the gaps between the branches and we shall be startled – shan’t we? – s we are startled at the end of every winter. We shall think: oh, I had quite forgotten there were three livable seasons.
If the war had proved anything it was that life had unexpected resistance to the instruments with which men had been issued. Simonson.
What was war, after all, but morale in helmets and jeeps? And what was morale if not one hundred million little conversations, the sum of which might leave men brave enough to advance? The true heart of war was in small talk.
We did not have hurry. We did not have electricity or fresh water or sadness either, because none of these had been connected to our village yet.
Don’t you think we shall all be kinder to one another? I hope one’s class will matter less and one’s convictions more. I hope we might be more inclined to pardon one another for our errors with both.