A true war story is never moral.

Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?

And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

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

A miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences . . . a miracle. . . . An act of high imagination -- daring and lurid and impossible. Yes, a cartoon of the mind.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.