...you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.

It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.

Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

When your afraid,reallyafraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.