“People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the ...”

“...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it...”

“We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.”

“We do tend to believe things while we're hearing or reading them. Afterwards, it's another matter, when the book is closed and the voice stops speaking.”

“Fiction has the ability to show us what we dont know and what doesnt happen.”

“When you dont know what to believe, when youre not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands o...”

“On the night of New Years Day, I thought of a wonderful New Years resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who only live in it.”

“The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman think about the next generation.”

“He was a consummate politician-- which is to say he was given to expedient speech and lacked even a vestigial spine.”

“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...”

“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.”