I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced.

Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.

Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.

I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world--or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin. (On Writing.)

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.