Stupid is as stupid looks.
So whatever else has happened, I am figgerin this: I can always look back an say, at least I ain’t led no hum-drum life.
I still got dreams like anybody else, an ever so often, I am thinkin about how things might of been.
Let me say this: bein a idiot is no box of chocolates.
There are jus times when you can’t let the right thing stand in yo way.
I cannot, in good conscience, allow money to be wasted on a failure.
Dear God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far away.
Now you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, but I could run like the wind blows. From that day on, if I was ever going somewhere, I was running!
That’s all I have to say about that.
The weeks go by so slow I almost think time passin backwards.
Let me say this: being an idiot is no box of chocolates. People laugh, lose patience, treat you shabby. Now they say folks supposed to be kind to the afflicted, but let me tell you this – it ain’t always that way. Even so, I got no complaints, cause I reckon I done live a pretty interesting life, so to speak.
So the next day I asked Dan how is it that Bubba can get killed, and what kind of half assed nature law would allow that. He thought about it for a while, and said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you, Forrest, all of these laws are not specially pleasing to us. But there is laws nonetheless. Like when a tiger pounce on a monkey in the jungle – bad for the money, but good for the tiger. That is just the way it is.
I have suffered a loss, Forrest, far greater than my legs. It’s my spirit, my soul, if you will. There is only a blank there now – medals where my soul used to be.
You treat everybody like they are your friend. It ain’t that way in the world, Forrest. A lot of people ain’t your friend. They are just lookin at you the way a banker looks at somebody comes in for a loan – How I’m gonna fleece this rube? That’s the way it is, Forrest. That’s the way it is.
Bullets an stuff be flying all over. It is something I simply cannot understand – why in hell is we doing all this, anyway? Playing football is one thing. But this, I do not know why. Goddamn.
Eleanor Roosevelt had just conducted a two-month, twenty-five-thousand-mile tour of American fighting units in the South Pacific. This included Guadalcanal and other of the Solomon Islands, during which she is said to have told an audience of marines: “The marines that I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marines!
I found the head nurse and asked her, and she said Dan has been flown back to America on account of they can take better care of him there. I asked her if he is okay, and she said, ‘Yeah, if you can call two punctured lungs, a severed intestine, spinal separation, a missing foot, a truncated leg, and third degree burns over half the body okay, then he is just fine. I thanked her, and went on my way.
Sure, Gump,” he say. “What the hell – we will even get him accommodations in first class.
I shrug my shoulders an nod my head, but somethin down in me sinkin fast. I am jus a po ole idiot, an now I have got the whole human race to look after.
I got to tell you, that if it weren’t for that harmonica music, i might of just packed up and gone home, but it made me feel so good, I can hardly describe it. Sort of like my whole body is the harmonica and the music give me goosebumps when I play it.