Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter – like a wail – acknowledges and replies to pain.
I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy.
They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.
A true war story is never moral...
The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.
If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.
It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid.
If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth.
Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?
The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.
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.