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Kevin Powers

Kevin Powers Quotes

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Famous Kevin Powers Quotes

“I was going home. But home, too, was hard to get an image of, harder still to think beyond the last curved enclosure of the desert, where it seemed I had left the better portion of myself as one among innumerable grains of sand, how in the end the weather-beaten stone is not one stone but only that which has been weathered, a result, an example of slow erosion on a thing by wind or waves that break against it, so that the else of anyone involved ends up deposited like silt spilling out into an estuary, or gathered at the bottom of a river in a city that is all you can remember.”

WarTraumaPtsd
Book:The Yellow Birds
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“I looked out the window and saw the street and railroad tracks, the woods beyond. Beyond the woods, the county of which they were a part. And so on, until it all dissolved into the larger thing: my mother's house becoming every other house as I once had seen it, sitting atop the southern end of a broad river valley, close enough to the the mountains that every few years a scared black bear would wander down into the remaining forest, and close enough to the ocean that those early English settlers took it as the farthest point they'd go upstream, the geology of the place preventing them from having any choice other than the one wherein they said, "We are lost; therefore we will call this home." And close enough that as a child I had been teased by older kids who said if I only tried hard enough I would smell salt water, and I, believing, stood among the light poles and the gulls in the parking lots of A&Ps and cried when I knew that it was true despite the fact that they had meant to lie, as children sometimes do.”

TruthChildhood
Book:The Yellow Birds
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“Hey, how are you?" they'd say. And I'd answer, "I feel like I'm being eaten from the inside out and I can't tell anyone what's going on because everyone is so grateful to me all the time and I'll feel like I'm ungrateful or something. Or like I'll give away that I don't deserve anyone's gratitude and really they should all hate me for what I've done but everyone loves me for it and it's driving me crazy." Right. Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn't any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, your're taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever and yeah they might have been trying to kill you too, so you say, What are you gonna do?, but really it doesn't matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing you could have done, the one person you promised would live is dead, and you have seen all things die in more manners than you'd like to recall...”

WarSoldierIraqPtsdVeterans Survivor Guilt
Book:The Yellow Birds
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“There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem - whether it's the music or some other element of it - that just seems to access another part of the brain. You know, Charles Olson talks about this transfer of energy that happens between the writer and the reader of the poem. I guess there's something essential to me about acknowledging upfront the immensity of it - the difficulty of it - and even allowing that to be the subject.”

ReadingEnergyBrainDifficulty
Author:Kevin Powers
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“The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren't any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood.”

WayHas BeensYoungFatherCareersRolesMilitaryModelsMy FamilyArmyMalesSoldierRole ModelsGrandfatherAdulthoodUnclesMarineMy GrandfatherWwiiArrivingMarine CorpsMale Role Models
Author:Kevin Powers
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“You want to fall, that's all. You think it can't go on like that. It's as if your life is a perch on the edge of a cliff and going forward seems impossible, not for a lack of will, but a lack of space. The possibility of another day stands in defiance of the laws of physics. And you can't go back. So you want to fall, let go, give up, but you can't. And every breath you take reminds you of that fact. So it goes.”

IfsThinkingWantGivingFactsSeemsLawLife IsFallSpaceImpossiblePossibilityGoes OnLetting GoGiving UpBreathsEdgesPhysicsCliffsDefianceAnother DayLaws Of Physics
Author:Kevin Powers
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“The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.”

WarGrowthPrayerCitiesPathThousandSpringLowsTownsMovedWeatherHillsGrassTallPioneersRibsCities And Towns
Book:The Yellow Birds
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