Everything is touched by the holy when it is in the presence of death.

The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn't teach me how to deal with killing.

Cynicism is no more mature than naïveté. You're no more mature, just more burned.

War is society's dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults.

He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn’t evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing.

I knew many Marines had done brave deeds that no one saw and for which they got no medals at all. I was having a very hard time carrying those medals and didnt have the insight or maturity to know what to do with my combination of guilt and pride.