There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.

A true war story is never moral.

...precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.

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

It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.

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.

He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important.