“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...”

“It is for your own good to love a dare-devil rather than a holy coward. A dare-devil is a unique devil, battling your fears, your pains, conquering your uncertainties, carrying you his arms, and fl...”

“Life is not a battle to win but a melody to sing.”

“Every man should lose a battle in his youth, so he does not lose a war when he is old.”

“I have gone to war and now I can issue my complaint. I can sit on my porch and complain all day. And you must listen. Some of you will say to me: You signed the contract, you crying bitch, and you ...”

“Twelve years ago, when I was 10, I played at being a soldier. I walked up the brook behind our house in Bronxville to a junglelike, overgrown field and dug trenches down to water level with my frie...”

“For no matter how many battles had been won or lost, no matter how many friends and soldiers killed, every battle felt like the first. And I realized that it wasn't the training, nor the pain of se...”

“It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable ...”

“If one morning in the Spring, a stranger came and said to me, Your mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, lover, friend, is dead. From a b-52, napalm bombing, search and destroy mission, air attac...”

“In the emergency of growing up, we all need heroes. But the father I grew up with was no hero to me, not then. He was too wounded in the head, too endlessly and terribly sad. Too funny, too explosi...”