That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.
But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
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.