"Because he didn’t much care whether he won or lost, he had a terrific poker face. “Nobody can tell what you’re thinking,” one of the other guys in the game grumbled. “Me? I gave up thinking for Lent,” Chester said. Everybody sitting around the table laughed."

"“This would involve cooperation with the Navy,” he said at last. By the way he said it, he might’ve been talking about eating with his fingers. The Army always had the feeling that the Navy didn’t quite pull its weight."

"Will be appointed. Will be accepted. Will be permitted. Abell didn’t say who would do any of those things. He probably didn’t even think about it. In his world, things just happened, without any particular agency. That made him a good bureaucrat. Whether it made him a good soldier was a different question."

"“Are you going to see if history can repeat itself? And are you setting me up to take the fall if it does? It can’t be your fault, after all.” By you he didn’t mean Abell’s alone, but all the officers in Philadelphia who thought of war as theory and maps and not as cordite and burning barrels and mangled men. They were good at what they did. Because they were, they thought they knew everything there was to know about the business of organized slaughter. Morrell had a different, and lower, opinion."

"The American general had chosen the next grandest for his own: another Classical Revival home from before the War of Secession. Sandbagged machine gun nests and a thicket of barbed wire around the place detracted from the air of quiet elegance the colonnaded entranceway tried to project."

"It was enough to make a man with a conscience feel guilty. Of course, a man with that kind of conscience had no business getting into Intelligence in the first place."

"A man who expended power on a whim was a fool."

"Poffenberger eyed Pound the way a man wearing a suit made of pork chops might eye a nearby bear."

"Like a man who’d sweet-talked a girl into bed with him, Sergeant Pound cared little about the whys and wherefores. All he cared about was that it had happened."

"He never asked for Pound’s opinion. He didn’t seem to think the War Department had issued opinions to enlisted men. If he’d had a better notion of what he was doing himself, Pound wouldn’t have minded so much. But he never had been able to suffer fools gladly, and he never had been able to suffer in silence, either."

"“All things considered, we got away cheap.” “Thank you, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. We got away cheap. The dead and the maimed would not agree with the exec. Sam found that he was inclined to. War measured what you dished out against what you took."

"The desire not to look bad before one’s fellow man is a strange, compelling, and terribly powerful thing."

"The kid from the State Department disappeared. Jake stared after him. Either they really were making them younger than they had once upon a time or he himself was starting to get some serious mileage on him. He suspected the problem did not lie with the State Department."

"Dowling had long since abandoned optimism along with the other illusions of his youth."

"He trusted Mormons no farther than he could throw them. They were as sneaky a bunch of bastards as you could imagine."

"Like other lower forms of life, second lieutenants were too dumb to know better."

"“It’s never too early for the truth,” Summers said, which proved he’d never been a lawyer."

"“Besides, when you’re smoking you can’t smell the goddamn war so much.” You can’t smell the goddamn war so much. Dowling wouldn’t have put it that way, which didn’t mean the kid was wrong. Even here in Washington, well back of the line, you noted whiffs of that smell. Dowling didn’t know what all went into it. Among the pieces, though, were unburied corpses, unwashed men, and uncovered latrine trenches. Cordite and smoke were two other constants. The smell had a sharper note in this war, for exhaust fumes had largely ousted the barnyard aroma of horses. And there was one other stink that never went away. It blew out of the War Department. With luck, it blew out of the War Department on the other side, too. And it usually did, for most wars went on for a long, long time. No, there was no escaping the all-invasive, all-pervasive reek of stupidity."

"He’d got good at the bureaucratic infighting, too, the sort of quiet warfare that measured itself as much by things prevented as by those accomplished."

"A man of strong opinions but limited vocabulary, O’Doull thought."

"The featured entrée with something called Swiss steak. It struck him as a good reason for emigrating from Switzerland."

"In a poker game, you were either a shark or you were bait."

"Like any Vice President, Charlie La Follette was the very definition of an unknown quantity."

"“Every word you say is true,” O’Doull answered. “Every single word. But saying it, no matter how true it is, doesn't make anybody on either side change his mind.”"

"Moonlight had a way of letting you down when you needed it most."

"The Sandwich Islands. Home of perfect weather, sugar cane, pineapple, and women of several races wearing no more than the perfect weather required. Home of the ukulele, the instrument the Devil had invented when he was trying for the guitar."

"Morrell pulled another horrible face. “Makes the war even more wonderful than the bombing raids and the poison gas and the machine guns, doesn't it?” Rohde shrugged. “No doubt. You're the one who makes his living fighting it, though, you and the fellows like you on the other side. I just make mine patching up the ones you don't quite kill.” “Thanks a lot, doc. I love you, too.”"

"Morrell laughed out loud. There went one cliché, shot down like a dive bomber with a fighter on its tail."

"Rodriguez remained dubious. Everybody who was an old-timer at this, that, or the other thing always went on and on about how tough things had been before all these new fellows came in. Talk was cheap. Talk was also commonly nonsense."

"Nothing was worse than a battlefield. Nothing could be. He was convinced of that. The devil hadn't known how to run hell before he took a long look at a Great War battlefield."

"He didn't feel like a knight in shining armor. He was filthy and fleabitten and probably lousy again. If they would have put him on a train and shipped him home, he wouldn't even have turned around to wave good-bye. He was here because the Army told him to be here and would shoot him if he bailed out, not because he thought God willed it. God was bound to have better things to do with His time."

"“If we can figure that out, how come the brass can’t?” Szczerbiakowicz asked. “Beats me, Eyechart,” Sam said. “You want stuff to make sense all the time, why the hell’d you join the Navy?”"

"They weren't entering a different country, but they were coming into a different world."

"You can only bend the long arm of coincidence so far before you break it."

"Security trumped productivity."

"Hardly anything is more pleasant than talking about why other people are a pack of damn fools."

"That was either the most brilliant analysis she’d ever heard—or the most breathtakingly cynical one. For the life of her, she couldn't decide which. Maybe it was both at once. Was that better or worse? She couldn't make up her mind there, either."

"And a pair of albatrosses glided along behind the Remembrance. They really did look almost big enough to land. He wondered what they thought of the great ship. Or were they too birdbrained to think at all? But this was their home. Men came here only to fight. That being so, who really were the birdbrains here?"

"“Sorry you woke up while I was tendin’ to it.” “Don't worry about that none,” his father said. “Got us plenty o’ more important things to worry about.” Cincinnatus wished he could have told him he was wrong. And he could have, too—but only if he were willing to lie."

"“These here is Army trucks—or trucks the gummint took from the Army,” Lucullus said. “Reckon they gonna be where there's sojers around. Ain’t got to worry ’bout thievin’ a whole hell of a lot.” This time, Cincinnatus laughed. “Only shows what you know. You ain't never seen the kind o’ thievin’ that goes on around Army trucks. I know what I'm talkin’ about there—you’d best believe I do. You start loadin’ stuff in Army trucks, and some of it's gonna walk with Jesus. I don't care how many soldiers you got. I don't care how many guns you got, neither. Folks steal.”"

"“People tell me all kinds of things.” Dowling said. “Some of them are true. Some of them help make the flowers grow.”"

"“I know something you don’t know.”… “Oh, yeah? What’s that?” Fishbein bristled at the very idea. “I know you talk too goddamn much.”"

"Never can tell with this, though. That there man taught the Mississippi to be twisty."

"The North American air war struck Potter as a duel with machine guns at a pace and a half."

"And now, just to prove how clever the elected rulers of the country were, they’d decided to reprise what hadn’t worked before."

"If you call a thing by a name that doesn't seem so repellent, then the thing itself also becomes less repellent. Sympathetic magic—except it wasn't sympathetic to those who fell victim to it."

"One of the drawbacks of being President, he’d discovered, was that you couldn’t always call a damn fool a damn fool to his face. Sometimes, no matter how big a damn fool he was, you knew you might need him again one of these days."

"He thought the army could get along without lieutenants much more easily than it could without sergeants. Lieutenants, no doubt, would disagree with him—but what the hell did lieutenants know? If they knew anything, they wouldn't have been lieutenants."

"“How am I?” “Except for being a damn fool for wanting to do this in the first place, you’re healthy as a horse,” Freedman answered. “But if they disqualified every damn fool in the Navy, they’d have twenty-seven men left, and how would they win the war then?”"

"Maybe’s a word that makes a lot of people sorry later."