Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over. People will get their respect for you from that-partly from that, don't get me wrong-but if you can say that you were up front where there was some real shooting going on, then that will mean a whole lot to you in years to come.

We are all born equally far from the sun.

My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.

But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.

It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart

But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved.

All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.