“The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that shed lived a life almost entirely i...”

“With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.”

“That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.”

“A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.”

“In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The ang...”

“Its a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasnt felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When youre afraid, really afraid, you s...”

“There are many different stories to tell. It's never the same. Every day weather blows in and out, alters the surface. Sometimes it is stripped down to a single essential truth, the thing that is a...”

“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...”

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, cap...”

“War is what happens when language fails.”

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

“The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.”