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War Memoir Quotes

Browse 6 quotes about War Memoir.

War Memoir Quotes

“Poor bastard, I thought, listening to him. He’s trying to hide from us. He’s dying, and he knows we want to kill him. What a fate: to gasp your life out all alone in the mud of a dirty little creek, helpless to hold off the slow death that is inside you and the quicker death that is walking up on you on the other side of the water. A death without love, a death without hope. God, who invented war? But if he gets back alive, I may be dead.”

“I grabbed the closest box of books and heaved it onto my bed. It contained all the books I had read in Iraq. Dog-eared, with broken spines, speckled with dirt, food, and even a little blood, most of the copies were marked up with notes in the margins. The better the book, the worse it looked--that's the way it should be. As I saw it, they were almost more like diaries than books.”

“A successful suicide doesn't just happen, although, of course, there are exceptions. Someone happens to be walking across a bridge when the feeling hits. Or they're on the roof of a building and realize they have nothing to live for. But most of the time, suicide takes planning. That's the way I figured. The was I was figuring...”

“I couldn't see killing myself if I had a book that was only half-read: Fountainhead, Catcher in the Rye, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, One Hundred Years of Solitude? No. I figured that those who killed themselves first had to finish whatever book they were reading...if it were any good, that is. Of course, there's always the occasional book that makes you want to throw yourself off a bridge just for having wasted your time reading it. But I usually finished those ones, too.”

“Many Germans nowadays say they were not Nazi, and many were not, but they were nearly ALL Party members. It was safer ... and if you were not, you could end up in a ‘camp’ for retraining ... so they mostly all paid ‘lip service’ to the Nazi Party.”

“I just call a volunteer standing two steps next to me who holds his head out for too long after the shot. At that moment, his head jolts, the familiar and terrible dull sound of the bullet’s impact sounds, and the man slowly collapses. The bullet penetrated the forehead and tore off half the skullcap behind. Still mid-fall, he claws his hands into the wound and smears himself over and over with his own brain. It was a terrible sight.”