Novelists From The United States

"For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies. Is it true? The answer matters. You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding of reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue"

"Any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. the grass, the soil — everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble."

"To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true."

"I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war."

"I would go to the war — I would kill and maybe die — because I was embarrassed not to. That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried."

"Right then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave."

"Intellect had run up against emotion. My conscience told me to run, yet some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it came to, stupidly, was a sense of shame. Hot, stupid shame. I did not want people to think badly of me."

"You were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing and dying for plain and simple reasons."

"I really like the way he writes about writing. He'll write a story, and then he'll write about how he wrote the story. Next he'll get into a story that he imagines. Then he'll hear from the person that he was writing about, and modify the story. He does a beautiful job."

"I feel the poet does write on memory but... Wasn't it Aristotle who said the historian keeps the factual record of mankind and the poet writes the emotional history of mankind? I think you can read a history of Vietnam and know that so many men under the age of twenty were killed, or you can read Tim O'Brien and you can "feel" those deaths. O'Brien is preserving the emotional history of Vietnam. A historian is preserving the facts."

"On the one hand I did think the war was less than righteous. On the other hand I love my country. And I valued my life in a small town and my friends and family. So I wrestled with what was, for me, at least, more torturous and devastating and emotionally painful than anything that happened in Vietnam. Do you go off and kill people if you're not pretty sure it's right? And if your nation isn't pretty sure it's right? If there isn't some consensus, do you do that? In the end, I just capitulated, and one day I got on a bus with some other recent graduates, and we went over to Sioux Falls about sixty miles away, and raised our hands and went into the Army. But it wasn't a decision; it was a forfeiture of a decision. It was letting my body go, turning a switch in my conscience, just turning it off, so it wouldn't be barking at me saying, "You're doing a bad and evil and stupid and unpatriotic thing." (from the companion book, p. 318)"

"[remembering the day he got his draft notice] It was a summer afternoon, maybe June of '68. And I remember taking that envelope into the house and putting it on the kitchen table where my mom and dad were having lunch. They just looked at it and knew what it was. The silence of that lunch. I didn't speak, my mom didn't speak, my dad didn't speak. It was just that piece of paper lying at the center of the table. It was enough to make me cry to this day, not for myself, but for my mom and dad, both of whom had been in the Navy during World War Two, and had believed in service to one's country and all those values. (from the companion book, p. 318)"

"[on the My Lai massacre and the outcome]: Who's responsible? The human beings who did this. These are war crimes. The individual human beings who put a rifle muzzle up against a baby's head and shot the brains out of that baby, nothing happened to them. Nothing! (quoted in the companion book by Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns, p. 473)"

"We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible. ("I love you," someone says, and instantly we begin to wonder--"Well, how much?"--and when the answer comes--"With my whole heart"--we then wonder about the wholeness of a fickle heart.) Our lovers, our husbands, our wives, our farthers, our gods--they are all beyond us. (p. 101 )"

"A fat little kid doing magic in front of a stand-up mirror. 'Hey, kiddo, that's a good one,' his father could've said, but for reasons unknown, reasons mysterious, the words never got spoken. He had wanted to be loved. And to be loved he had practiced deception. He had hidden the bad things. He had tricked up his own life. Only for love. Only to be loved. (pp. 242-243)"

"I was just reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and I felt the American war in Vietnam in my bones."

"At night, when I couldn't sleep, I'd sometimes carry on silent arguments with those people. I'd be screaming at them, telling them how much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a war they didn't understand and didn't want to understand."

"I remember opening the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasn't thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once — I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn't happen. I was above it."

"Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead."

"They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."

"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 were afraid of dying but even more afraid to show it."

"They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the power of the things they carried."

"You can find nearly anything human in Los Angeles, good and bad. I don’t think it would be workable as a city without mental therapy."

"“From what we’ve been told, he wasn’t very humble, was he, Mr. Lascal?” Lascal shook his head. “I don’t know many writers who are.”"

"What he liked he despised for being likable."

"The feedback loop is half of the secret of existence."

"Eccentricity is more than affectation to a poet. It’s a necessity."

"Poetry is dead and buried in a world of growing LitVid and illiteracy, vidiocy I’ve heard it called. Being dead, poetry has enormous freedom; being ignored, it can blossom like a rose in a manure heap. Poetry is risen. Poetry is the messiah of literature but the angel has not yet told anybody it is risen."

"I explored new territory and described it. I did not create it. Don’t blame the conduit for the lightning."

"Ours is an age of social anger."

"Conflict of the sexes is not a disease; it is an unavoidable byproduct like the smoke and water from a fire."

"More and more I am nothing without someone. To be alone is to be in bad company."

"A Stellar’s jay hopped along behind him, watching closely for dropped crumbs. “It’s dark,” he told the bird. “Go to sleep. I've eaten already. Where were you? No food now.” The bird persisted, however; it knew humans were liars."

"Altruism is masked self-interest. Aggressive self-interest is a masked urge to self-destruction."

"Life on earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization..."

"I sometimes think we deserve to die, we’re all so goddamned stupid."

"“It’s not impossible,” Minelli said. “No,” Edward admitted, “but it’s paranoid as hell, and that’s the last thing we need, more fear.”"

"Apocalypse could not be repealed by the democratic process."

"“We’d like to agree with you.” He glanced at Arthur. “We can’t, however,” Arthur said. “For the moment, then, amicable disagreement and open minds.”"

"Having one’s eyes opened doesn’t make one grateful."

"Grief is not productive. It simply represents an inefficiency in accepting change of status."

"“That’s insane,” Lanier said. “Not very. It’s politics.”"

"Sometimes I feel like a beetle crawling through a fusion power plant. I can feel a certain amount, see a certain amount, but I sure as hell don’t understand everything."

"Nothing is lost. Nothing is forgotten. It was in the blood, the flesh, And now it is forever."

"“Very evocative. He seems to be confirming what I said last year—that the universe really has no underpinnings, that when a good hypothesis comes along, one that explains the prior events, the underpinnings shape themselves to accommodate and a powerful theory is born.” “Then there is no ultimate reality?” “Apparently not. Bad hypotheses, those that don’t fit what happen on our level, are rejected by the universe. Good ones, powerful ones, are incorporated.”"

"Information can be stored even more compactly than in molecular memory. It can be stored in the structure of space-time. What is matter, after all, but a standing-wave of information in the vacuum?"

"Nothing will ever be the same again. Good! Wonderful! Wasn’t it all badly flawed anyway? No, perhaps not. Not until now."

"He may not have had time, but even allowing him the time, Vergil simply did not think such things through. Brilliant in the creation, slovenly in the consideration of consequences. But wasn’t that true of every creator? Didn’t anyone who changed things ultimately lead some people—perhaps many people—to death, grief, torment?"

"“You’re a romantic, aren’t you?” she said. “I suppose I am.” “I am too. The silliest people in the world are romantics.”"