Historical Novelists

"Sometimes a fellow who’d learned what to do with a rifle in his hands didn't care in which direction he pointed it."

"But then, how much of war was finding out the hard way what the other fellow had that you didn't know about ahead of time? Put that way, it sounded quietly philosophical. Put another way, it meant Sam was likely to get killed because some dimbulb in Philadelphia was asleep at the switch."

"“You're lucky as hell, kid,” Moss said, glad to have something to talk about besides the pounding of his heart. “That's only a scratch, and you'll get yourself a Purple Heart on account of it.” “If I'd been lucky, they would have missed me,” the lieutenant said, which held more than a little truth. If he'd been unluckier, though, all the infinite cleverness and articulation of that hand would have been smashed to bloody, bony ruin in less than the blink of an eye."

"If you happened to end up in the wrong place at the wrong instant, you could be the best soldier in the world and it wouldn't matter one goddamn bit. Your next of kin would get a wire from the War Department, and that would be that."

"Chester almost said so—almost, but not quite. He and Rita had been married a while now. He’d learned a wise man didn't antagonize his wife over something inherently unprovable, especially when she’d just given him breakfast."

"Sometimes convenience counted for more than ideology."

"“‘The Confederate state must make up for what everyone else has neglected in this field. It must set race at the center of all life. It must take care to keep itself pure.’”"

"The exec usually did Captain Stein's dirty work for him. The skipper got the credit, the exec got the blame: an ancient Navy rule."

"He still couldn't believe she was dead. She’d been one of those fiercely vital people you thought of as going on forever. But life didn't work like that, and war had an obscene power all its own. What it wanted, it took, and an individual’s vitality mattered not at all to it."

"Mirrors reflecting into other mirrors reflecting into other mirrors yet…Intelligence was that kind of game, a chess match with both players moving at the same time and both of them blindfolded more often than not."

"Armstrong Grimes still had a lot to learn about being a soldier, but he understood shooting first and asking questions later."

"During a war, nobody ever showed up on time, except possibly the enemy."

"It was an eminently sensible question. Moss didn't want good sense, though. He wanted to be told what he wanted to hear. That he was thinking like a three-year-old was a telling measure of how tired he was, but he was too tired to realize it."

"Mooers might not have been in the middle of nowhere, but it wasn’t right at the edges, either."

"Where cool heads had failed, hotheads prevailed."

"Cincinnatus stared at him. That had to be the most cynical assessment he'd ever heard in his life, and he'd heard a lot of them. But, along with the cynicism, it made a lot more sense than he wished it did."

"But when he ached, when he panted, when the world was too much with him, Marx and revolution held a wild temptation. Like cheap booze for a drunk, he thought wearily, except revolutions make people do even stupider things."

"A wise husband didn’t quarrel even when he was right. Quarreling when you knew you were wrong was a recipe for disaster."

"He still sounded earnest and sincere. Flora still had no doubt he meant every word he said, meant it from the bottom of his heart. She also had no doubt he didn't have any idea how irritating he was to her."

"She was willing to give her life for her country. She wasn’t willing to throw it away."

"The artillery duel between U.S. and C.S. guns started up again, each side feeling for the other in the night. Listening to death fly back and forth overhead was almost like watching a tennis match, except both sides could serve at once and there could be more than one ball in the air at the same time."

"He'd have a hell of a time getting anyone to work for him if people knew he might sell them out when that looked like a profitable thing to do. If you had scruples about such things, you didn't belong in Intelligence in the first place."

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

"“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?”"

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"“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.”"

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

"“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.”"

"“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."

"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?"

"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."

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

"Security trumped productivity."

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

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

"“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?”"

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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.”"

"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."

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

"“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.”"

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