“Had I glimpsed just a little of the suffering I would witness and the heartbreak I would endure, I would have fled in the other direction...But I could not foresee any of these things...And many years later, with tears in my eyes, I remembered my decision to follow this God no matter what the cost.”
“If you don t like it, Eat me.”
“A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.”
“I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.”
“...We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned withpot coffin or ceremony, our hasty untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.”
“If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it?”
“Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn t do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives. They have seen themselves in extreme circumstances and, in that, they have seen their own extremes.”
“Listen: I don t have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that s twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.”
“This is a work of memory -- facts have been altered. Names have been changed.”
“I’m a young man, trained to do what is necessary, but all the training in the world can’t prepare you for the first time you have to kill another human being or see a buddy get blown apart. No, I’m not tough… I’m scared.”
“Trouble! Now that’s one commodity we never run short of in Vietnam.”
“I’m young, strong, healthy meat for the “little conflict” that got out of hand.”
“When you have so much to live for, fear is more predominant than ever.”
“You don’t know LONELY till you’re in a war zone and cut off from everything and everyone you know and love.”
“When you’re in the boonies and fighting for your own life, you can’t stop and have a good cry because the best friend in your life just checked out of the war and left nothing but emptiness in his place.”
“There are hundreds – no thousands of guys waiting to get on that magic flight back to the world. I’m just a grain of sand in the desert of people with a single thought: home!”
“The only thing worse than fighting in a war, is fighting in a war within a war.”