... when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.

A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.

Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.

[Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rusack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

Once you're alive, you can't ever be dead.