Stories are for joining the past to the future. 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. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.
I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.
But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.
War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.
What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end...
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
I survived, but it’s not a happy ending.
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.
The greater a man’s fear, the greater his potential courage.
You learn, finally, that you’ll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you know for a fact that you can’t ever bring any of it back again. You just can’t.
They were afraid of dying, but they were even more afraid to show it.
Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.
I’m not 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.
A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of impossibility to it – like running a dead-end maze – no way out – it couldn’t come to a happy conclusion and yet I was doing it anyway because it was all I could think of to do.
In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.
Did I choose this life of illusion? Don’t be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.
Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved.