War Quotes - Page 36

Be resolved that honor is heavier than the mountains and death lighter than the feather.

Ever since you and I were boys of fifteen, I have been in countless battles, from skirmishes to giant wars that determined the fate of nations; if there is one thing I have learned from all that experience, Garanth, it is that battles are alive. Battles are living things. As with beasts, you must try to know them, you must handle them with care and some love, but you must never take your eyes off them, or they will go for your throat. Battles are wild beasts that can never be truly tamed, Garanth. You need both a whip and meat if you want them to turn on your foes and not yourself. The general . . . does not understand this.

Kaoru Kurimoto

I have this feeling that immigrants unwittingly help to keep peace between nations by being scapegoats for national ills that would otherwise be blamed on neighbours.

Agona Apell

Another such victory over the Romans, and we are undone.

Pyrrhus

I do not hope for a world at peace, all of it, all the time. I do not believe in the perfectibility of man, which is what would be required for world peace; I only believe in the human race. I believe the human race must continue.

Martha Gellhorn

A hero is a matter of perspective. The only sure thing in war is casualties. Ideology, patriotism and religious zeal all fuel heroic notions.

Matt Hawkins

Only when life is quiet, Empress," Oli said. "When the battle comes our way or we see a need, we will pick up our swords and fight beside the bravest of men, even knowing we may fall. But once all is well again... that's when the darkness comes. Then we sit in silence and struggle to grasp our peace the best we can.

Jill Williamson

Love and war are exactly alike. It is lawful to use tricks and slights to obtain a desired end.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

War means endless waiting, endless boredom. There is no electricity, so no television. You can't read. You can't see friends. You grow depressed but there is no treatment for it and it makes no sense to complain — everyone is as badly off as you. It's hard to fall in love, or rather, hard to stay in love. If you are a teenager, you seem halted in time.If you are critically ill — with cancer, for instance — there is no chemotherapy for you. If you can't leave the country for treatment, you stay and die slowly, and in tremendous pain. Victorian diseases return — polio, typhoid and cholera. You see very sick people around you who seemed in perfectly good health when you last saw them during peacetime. You hear coughing all the time. Everyone hacks — from the dust of destroyed buildings, from disease, from cold.As for your old world, it disappears, like the smoke from a cigarette you can no longer afford to buy. Where are your closest friends? Some have left, others are dead. The few who remain have nothing new to talk about. You can't get to their houses, because the road is blocked by checkpoints. Or snipers take a shot when you leave your door, so you scurry back inside, like a crab retreating inside its shell. Or you might go out on the wrong day and a barrel bomb, dropped by a government helicopter, lands near you.Wartime looks like this.

Janine Di Giovanni

Seek only to preserve life -- your own and those of others. Life alone is sacred.

Yasuo Kuwahara

As melancholia replaced the jarring of my invention, I sat.Unable to breathe in the smog I had created, unable to stand on my betraying legs, unable to howl at the heavens over my sordid soul.In this inferno, I became paroxysmic, my self-hatred, superparamount, numbness dulling the agony of such a devilish act,An iron curtain fell upon the surrounding world, or at least what I had left of it to be owned by the laconic eclipse.All the angels fled, disowning my prayers, the lurid world backed away, leaving me forsaken and detached,I could no longer hear the bombings, hear them fall, my own fabrication, only the dead air that came after, the intense silence.Cynical and paralyzed, I realized I had purloined a portion of Hell and given it to the unwilling Earth,Punishing those I had no right to punish, judging those I had no reason to condemn, destroying cities I had never set foot in.This is how I became Death, the destroyer of Worlds.

Moonshine Noire

What the war did to the dreamers.

Anthony Doerr

The seriousness of being part of Operation Desert Storm-the first major foreign crisis for the United States after the end of the Cold War- was never lost upon us.

Carlos Wallace

Staring down the reality of war, far from home, asleep among strangers, that familiarity, those memories, those ties kept us going; gave us a reason to persevere; toughened us up.

Carlos Wallace

You fight by rules to keep your humanity

Adam Makos

She now discovered amidst them, the poet's flights of fancy, and the historian's seldom pleasing—ever instructive page. The first may transmit to posterity the records of a sublime genius, which once flashed in strong, but transient rays, through the tenement of clay it was given a moment to inhabit: and though the tenement decayed and the spirit fled, the essence of a mind which darted through the universe to cull each created and creative image to enrich an ever-varying fancy, is thus snatched from oblivion, and retained, spite of nature, amidst the mortality from which it has struggled, and is freed. The page of the historian can monarchs behold, and not offer up the sceptre to be disencumbered of the ponderous load that clogs their elevation! Can they read of armies stretch upon the plain, provinces laid waste, and countries desolated, and wish to be the mortal whose vengeance, or whose less fierce, but fatal decision sent those armies forth!

Mary Charlton

War has often been called a game, with good reason. Both have combatants. Both have sides. Both carry the risk of losing.

Samantha Shannon

The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play.

Mohsin Hamid

Across the sea fat kings watched and were gleeful, that something begun so well had now gone off the rails (as down South similar kings watched), and if it went off the rails, so went the whole kit, forever, and if someone ever thought to start it up again, well, it would be said (and said truly): The rabble cannot manage itself.Well, the rabble could. The rabble would.He would lead the rabble in managing.The thing would be won.

George Saunders

The blood of the setting sun suddenly spilled out on the western horizon like that of millions of people who have died in some violent war that has broken out between Earth and Heaven. Suddenly the war ended in defeat and all-embracing darkness descended and pervaded all four corners of the globe, wiping out the sadness and shyness that was in her eyes.

Tayeb Salih

Well, good luck,’ the Vietnam verbal tic...It was as though people couldn’t stop themselves from saying it, even when they actually meant to express the opposite wish, like, ‘Die, motherfucker.’ Usually it was only an uninhabited passage of dead language, sometimes it came out five times in a sentence, like punctuation, often it was spoken flat side up to telegraph the belief that there wasn’t any way out; tough shit, sin loi, smack it, good luck. Sometimes, though, it was said with such feeling and tenderness that it could crack your mask, that much love where there was so much war. Me too, every day, compulsively, good luck: to friends in the press corps going out on operations, to grunts I’d meet at firebases and airstrips, to the wounded, the dead and all the Vietnamese I ever saw getting fucked over by us and each other, less often but most passionately to myself, and though I meant it every time I said it, it was meaningless. It was like telling someone going out in a storm not to get any on him, it was the same as saying, ‘Gee, I hope you don’t get killed or wounded or see anything that drives you insane.’ You could make all the ritual moves, carry your lucky piece, wear your magic jungle hat, kiss your thumb knuckle smooth as stones under running water, the Inscrutable Immutable was still out there, and you kept on or not at its pitiless discretion. All you could say that wasn’t fundamentally lame was something like, ‘He who bites it this day is safe from the next,’ and that was exactly what nobody wanted to hear.

Michael Herr

I had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate this indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever "here" may be, it must always happen "here" before it can be perceived to have happened. And then, it is not really perceived, it is simply endured. Out of this endurance come, for the most part, alas, monuments, legends, and lies. People cling to these in order to deny that what happened is always happening; that what happened is not an event skewered and immobilized by time, but a continuing and timeless mirror of ourselves.

James Baldwin

Battle is gruesome, but it is vigorous, alive. The aftermath is the worst of it: adrenaline fades, quiet sweeps in, and there’s nothing to distract you from the mess of bodies and disturbed earth.

Darrell Drake

People who try to tell you what the blitz was like in London start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail which crept in and set and became the symbol of the whole thing for them. . . . "It's the glass," says one man, "the sound in the morning of the broken glass being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle." ... An old woman was selling little miserable sprays of sweet lavender. The city was rocking under the bombs and the light of burning buildings made it like day. . . . And in one little hole in the roar her voice got in—a squeaky voice. "Lavender!" she said. "Buy Lavender for luck."The bombing itself grows vague and dreamlike. The little pictures remain as sharp as they were when they were new.

John Steinbeck

...And unpredictability can spread: one powerful outlier can pave the way for others, and as more states joint the outlier, the foundations of the rule of law begin to crumble.US counterterrorism practices--and the legal theories that under-pin them--are undermining the international rule of law in precisely this way...

Rosa Brooks

You can't win because of the guns," said Adam with a sigh. "Machine guns, mortars, field guns, howitzers: it doesn't matter how much courage soldiers have, how much will; flesh and blood can't pass through bullets and shells, or at least not in sufficient numbers to have any effect. The guns win in the end and they always will. Not us, not the Germans - the guns.

Simon Tolkien

The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it's said, even know they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way that they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War.

Thomas Pynchon

Ask him where his shame is." They spoke. "He says this is war. There is no shame in war." "Tell him he's wrong. War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.

Khaled Hosseini

What does it matter who is ruler of a realm that no longer exists?

Krishna Udayasankar

... Blood pounded inside his skull.The pounding became more distinct. A thundering and a racing of hoofs, rising like a storm over the hills to the north. The triumphant baying of the Saxon war-horns was echoed by others, more distant. These were higher, shriller, the prelude to the storm.Cavalry bugles. Bedwyr's lungs were full of smoke and blood, else he would have laughed.The dragon had come at last.

David Pilling

To destroy the life that dwells in othersis beyond your power. The life of those you have slainhas vanished from your eyes, but is not destroyed. Youthought to lengthen your own life and to shorten theirs,but you cannot do this. Life knows neither time norspace. The life of a moment, and the life of a thousandyears: your life and the life of all the visible and invisiblebeings in the world, are equal. To destroy life, or to alterit, is impossible; for life is the one thing that exists. Allelse, but seems to us to be.

Leo Tolstoy

Telling my story was supposed to be a good thing but it had just made everything worse.

Sara Nović

I was so tired of his being even-keeled in the face of all that was upsetting and ugly and illogical.

Sara Nović

My mother used to say, Preeto, there is never a right or a wrong side to a problem, but there can be to people. Not everyone here is on the right side, not everyone there is. You need to ask yourself, which side do you want to be on?

Sanchit Gupta

All they want is to point a finger.

Sanchit Gupta

Imagine living in a world where we no longer believe that war can lead to peace. War can't lead to peace anymore than ignorance can lead to knowledge. War leads to premature death, pain, suffering, hatred, fear and more separation.

Renée Paule

I thought I lost you""You will never lose me." Paul kissed the top of her head. "And even if I have to leave, you must know that I will come back to you again. If you'll wait for me?

Caroline Leech

That's my secret and my shame. I'm Nona Grey, war is in my veins, and the screams of my enemies are music to me.

Mark Lawrence

I sometimes think that normal, everyday life is only a delusion. We walk on a think crust of earth which we call peace; and every now and again we can hear a rumble below our feet; and sometimes the crust splits and we see that, underneath there is a glowing inferno ready to erupt. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, but it is always there.

Helen MacInnes

Take the sailor," he said. "he signs on to a new ship. He's surrounded by nothing but strangers. Not only do they come from other towns and parts of his own country, but often from completely different nations. He has to learn to work with them. His vocabulary's broadened, he learns new words and grammar, and he comes across new ways of thinking. he turns into a different man, unlike the one who spends his life plowing the same old furrow. These are the men the world needs, not nationalists and warmongers.

Carsten Jensen

The soldiers had been entrenched in their positions for several weeks but there was little, if any fighting, except for the dozen rounds they ritually exchanged every day. The weather was extremely pleasant. The air was heavy with the scent of wildflowers and nature seem to be following its course, quite unmindful of the soldiers hiding behind rocks and camouflaged by mountain shrubbery. The birds sang as they always had and the flowers were in bloom. Bees buzzed about lazily. Only when a shot rang out, the birds got startled and took flight, as if a musician had struck a jarring note on his instrument. It was almost the end of September, neither hot nor cold. It seemed as if summer and winter had made their peace. In the blue skies, cotton clouds floated all day like barges on a lake.The soldiers seemed to be getting tired of this indecisive war where nothing much ever happened. Their positions were quite impregnable. The two hills on which they were placed faced each other and were about the same height, so no one side had an advantage. Down below in the valley, a stream zigzagged furiously on its stony bed like a snake.The air force was not involved in the combat and neither of the adversaries had heavy guns or mortars. At night, they would light huge fires and hear each other's voices echoing through the hills.From The Dog of Titwal, a short story.

sadat hasan manto

Had the Battle of Franklin ever really ended? Carrie walked her cemetery, and around her the wounds closed up and scarred over, but only in that way that an oak struck by lightning heals itself by twisting and bending around the wound: it is still recognizably a tree, it still lives as a tree, it still puts out its leaves and acorns, but its center, hidden deep within the curtain of green, remains empty and splintered where it hasn't been grotesquely scarred over. We are happy the tree hasn't died, and from the proper angle we can look on it and suppose that it is the same tree as it ever was, but it is not and never will be.

Robert Hicks

Any leader who feel the pain and fight for you. Support him or you lose but if that leader doesn't feel the pain and fight for you. Don't support him, fight for yourself, be a leader and fight for others.

Saminu Kanti

... it would matter ... to the tens of thousands of young Americans ... who would ... be invited to put on uniforms, fly to the other side of the world, spread their nether cheeks, and sit down on the big green dildo that was Vietnam.

Stephen King

he inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn’t more or less relinquished poetry by then.

Kate Atkinson

People spoke in whispers, as if the war was listening

Chris Cleave

When you're in bed to-night think not of wars, But rather of the Panda fast asleep, Her piebald head cushioned on woolly paws; Or think of velvet mice that warmly creepInto their holes to curl up round and soft. Transfer your thoughts from bellicose affairs;Though it be true that bombers fly aloft,Try to reflect on little furry

Virginia Graham

Everything stinks: creosote, bleach, disinfectant, soil, blood, gangrene.The military authorities say uniforms must be preserved at all costs, but that means manhandling patients who are in agony. Cut them off, says Sister Byrd, and she's the voice of authority here, in the Salle d'Attente, not some gold-braid-encrusted crustacean miles away from blood and pain, so cut they do, snip, snip, snip, snip, as close to the skin as they dare.On either side of Paul as he cuts are two long rows of feet: yellow, strong, calloused, scarred where blisters have formed and burst repeatedly. Since August they've done a lot of marching, these feet, and all their marching has brought them to this one place.

Pat Barker

The luckiest generation in a country is always the one which has never went through any war in their lifetimes!

Mehmet Murat ildan

No Two person are enemies to each other unless on joins politics

irrfan ishaq

The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labour. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact."Julia? Are you awake? There is truth, and there is untruth. To be in a minority of one doesn't make you mad.

George Orwell

And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hidIts bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.

Wilfred Owen

Nothing seems to tempt fate more than mentioning the possibility of something bad happening.

Donald G. Firesmith

I don't want truth, Palmer; I want smoke!" Captain Ahearn: Waiting For Willie Pete

Byron Edgington

Give me a book and I may change the world, give me a weapon and there will be no world to change.

Raouf Reda Habib

-“I remember my father telling me about England’s redrawing of India’s boundaries when it became independent. They wanted to separate the Hindu from the Muslim, but they used outdated maps. Twelve million people had to relocate because the Brits screwed it up so badly. And a half million people died during the resulting chaos. And before that, Iraq was unilaterally cobbled together, causing many of the conflicts we see today. There are dozens of such examples. The strong countries smashing the weaker ones and then avoiding responsibility later for the very problems they caused.”-“You keep proving my point, Tom, that we’re rotten to the core.”-“My point is we never learn!

David Baldacci

I remember my father telling me about England’s redrawing of India’s boundaries when it became independent. They wanted to separate the Hindu from the Muslim, but they used outdated maps. Twelve million people had to relocate because the Brits screwed it up so badly. And a half million people died during the resulting chaos. And before that, Iraq was unilaterally cobbled together, causing many of the conflicts we see today. There are dozens of such examples. The strong countries smashing the weaker ones and then avoiding responsibility later for the very problems they caused.”“You keep proving my point, Tom, that we’re rotten to the core.”“My point is we never learn!

David Baldacci

In all our human squabbles, threats of nuclear war, denying climate change, we hardly stop to think of the trees that bend in the wind, the bird that feeds it's young, and the elephants bedding down for the night as we toy with the destruction of this gift given to them.

Eileen Anglin

What makes a human being want to kill another who has done him no personal harm? Patriotism.

Theresa Breslin

Peace that follows battle is a futile peace. It is time to count dead and to assess which side stands closer to the win.

J.E. DiPalo

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War Quotes - Page 36

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