Imagination is a killer.
Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.
With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.
But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you’re in a forest and everything’s really quiet, expect there’s still this sound you can’t hear.
In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.
A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
All that peace, man, if felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.
Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.
I guess we’re really brothers, aren’t we? Don’t know what that means, except it means that some of the same things we remember.
He had an opinion of himself, I think, that was too high for his own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was a low opinion that he kept trying to erase.
Let the story tell itself.
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 would otherwise consume us.
For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.
I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.
Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones – THAT kind of love.
Words, too, have genuine substance – mass and weight and specific gravity.
The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.
It wasn’t a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.
A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.
A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.