Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.

Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting

To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself.

The things men did or felt they had to do.

Keep things at arm's length... If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.