War Stories Quotes

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  War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

  William Tecumseh Sherman

  Death, Military, War

  "The Civil War Generation". Book by Norman K. Risjord, p. 143, 2002.

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• In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

  Tim O'Brien

  War, Stories, Difficult

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.67, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.

  David Mamet

  War, Farewell, Tragedy

  "TheDC Interviews: David Mamet talks War". Interview with Patrick Howley, dailycaller.com. December 27, 2013.

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• A true war story is never moral.

  Tim O'Brien

  War, Stories, Moral

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.65, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• [Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

  Tim O'Brien

  War, Evil, Stories

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.66, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• War is, after all, the universal perversion ... war stories, the pornography of war.

  John Rae

  War, Stories, Pornography

  'The Custard Boys' (1960) ch. 13

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• I grew up reading Tolkien, and I love him. But I love him in the way that you love that rambly old grandfather. You have to sit through some pretty off-topic stuff before he starts telling his cool old war stories.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  War, Reading, I Love Him

  Source: aidanmoher.com

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• If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

  Tim O'Brien

  War, Lying, Believe

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.65, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

  Tim O'Brien

  Lying, War, Stories

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• I see the reports of Anson Hunter's death have been greatly exaggerated... and I trust so are his war stories.

  Richard Finney

  War, Hunters, Stories

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• Anyone who has been in business can tell war stories about the bumps in the road. But if they've outlasted the competition, ask for their stories about survival. They've figured out how to turn disappointments into opportunities.

  Harvey Mackay

  Disappointment, Business, War

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• I never wanted to do anything else but fight, when I was a kid. I never had any broader perspective of my own perspective. I didn't know anything about anything else. I just wanted to fight until I could fight no more, and then I wanted to own a bar and drink and tell war stories.

  Mike Tyson

  War, Kids, Fighting

  Source: collider.com

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• The last element in drama is high stakes. War, of course, is life and death - survival, not only for the story's characters, but often for the society itself. That's why I'm drawn to stories that are built around wars, even if they're not technically "war stories."

  Steven Pressfield

  Drama, War, Character

  Interview with Will Duquette, www.patheos.com. May 21, 2014.

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• I enjoyed Old Man's War immensely. A space war story with fast action, vivid characters, moral complexity and cool speculative physics, set in a future you almost want to live into, and a universe you sincerely hope you don't live in already.

  Ken MacLeod

  War, Character, Men

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• In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

  Tim O'Brien

  War, Stories, Safe

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.78, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.

  Tim O'Brien

  Real, War, Dirty

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.66, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Listen to me, convict. I have not traveled all this way to listen to your war stories. So shut your trap before I shut it for you. Commander Julius Root

  Eoin Colfer

  War, Roots, Stories

  Eoin Colfer (2003). “Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident - Book #2”, Miramax

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• And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

  Tim O'Brien

  Memories, War, Writing

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.81, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Explicit knowledge, conventionally delivered like pizza (neat boxes with toppings of concepts, theories, best practices and war stories), is consumed by the brain but not metabolized into action. The learning we call intuition, know-how and common sense gets into the blood stream through osmosis. It is shaped by social context.

  Richard Pascale

  War, Knowledge, Learning

  Richard T. Pascale, Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin (2010). “The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems”, p.146, Harvard Business Press

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• In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

  Tim O'Brien

  War, Eye, Ducks

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• I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.

  Tim O'Brien

  War, Grief, Thinking

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.81, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  War, Space, When You Love Someone

  Catherynne M. Valente (2011). “Deathless”, p.270, Macmillan

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• At the end of a criminal’s life, it’s always the small mistake, the coincidence, the lark. The time we got too comfortable, the time we slipped up, the time someone aimed a little to the left. I’ve heard Grandad’s war stories a thousand times. How they finally got Mo. How Mandy almost got away. How Charlie fell. Birth to grave, we know it’ll be us one day. Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first.

  Holly Black

  War, Mistake, Tragedy

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• My mother went to Radcliffe, and rather than just trying to get rich, she wanted to be a teacher and taught for over 30 years in the public schools. She's definitely got some war stories.

  Ben Affleck

  Mom, Mother, Teacher

  "Renaissance Man: Ben Affleck" by Karen Durbin, www.elle.com. September 24, 2010.

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• Most politicians - those people who live, eat and breathe politics - like to sit around and talk about politics and tell political war stories. Reagan didn't do that. His war stories were movie war stories and Hollywood war stories. He loved that.

  Lyn Nofziger

  War, People, Political

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