Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.

The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.

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

Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.

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.

But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.