But in a story I can steal her soul.

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

I guess we're really brothers, aren't we? Don't know what that means, except it means that some of the same things we remember.

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

In the attic, a warhead no doubt burns. Everything is combustible. Faith burns. Trust burns. Everything burns to nothing and even nothing burns. . . . And when there is nothing, there is nothing worth dying for and when there is nothing worth dying for, there is only nothing.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.