|
a445456
|
This life is slow suicide, unless you read.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
18eb2c0
|
Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
8db6499
|
Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and the fearful...Now the belief in God may turn out at the last trump to be a mistake. Meantime, let us be quite clear, it is not merely the comfort of the simple--though it is that too, much to its glory--it is a formidable intellectual position with which most of the first-class minds of the human race, century in..
|
|
faith
|
Herman Wouk |
|
73bb9cb
|
Remember this, if you can--there is nothing, nothing more precious than time. You probably feel you have a measureless supply of it, but you haven't. Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end--only in the end it becomes more obvious.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
4768623
|
The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you are not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, "How would I do this if I were a fool?" Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you will never go wro..
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
d0ea02a
|
Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there'..
|
|
death
ground-zero
thanatos-instinct
sadism
united-states
manhattan
modernity
|
Herman Wouk |
|
d8fb6d3
|
In the glare, the great and terrible light of this happening, God seems to signal that the story of the rest of us need not end, and that the new light can prove a troubled dawn. For the rest of us, perhaps. Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world's worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women, and children, all cut down. For them there can be..
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
5b6d01c
|
The girl you marry and the woman you must make a life with are two different people.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
06564d1
|
Life is a dream, a little more coherent than most.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
1557448
|
He was just head over ears in love, with a young woman as near as his hand and as remote as a star, and for the moment it was enough to be where she was.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
deffa70
|
The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for g..
|
|
existence
life
tropics
west-indies
summer
modernity
|
Herman Wouk |
|
72b57f0
|
I think it's a bit like coming to the end of a book. The plot's in its thickest, all the characters are in a mess, but you can see that there aren't fifty pages left, and you know that the finish can't be far off.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
0d55d3e
|
The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
355083b
|
About the nicest thing God ever invented was alcohol. He's proud of it, too. The Bible's full of kind remarks about booze.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
45d3882
|
You can't understand command till you've had it. It's the loneliest, most oppressive job in the whole world. It's a nightmare, unless you're an ox. You're forever teetering along a tiny path of correct decisions and good luck that meanders through an infinite gloom of possible mistakes.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
261da4d
|
So I have gone all the way around Robin Hood's barn to arrive at the old platitudes, which I guess is the process of growing up.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
d9a9e50
|
He had in his Bronx apartment a lodger less learned than himself, and much fiercer in piety. One day when we were studying the laws of repentance together, the lodger burst from his room. "What!" he said. "The atheists guzzles his whiskey and eats pork and wallows with women all his life long, and then repents the day before he dies and stands guiltless? While I spend a lifetime trying to please God?" My grandfather pointed to the book. "So..
|
|
spirituality
|
Herman Wouk |
|
884aa4a
|
Willie didn't have a historian's respect for the victories at Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, and Midway. The stream of news as it burbled by his mind left only a confused impression that our side was a bit ahead in the game, but making painful slow work of it. He had often wondered in his boyhood what it must have been like to live in the stirring days of Gettysburg and Waterloo; now he knew, but he didn't know that he knew. This war seemed to hi..
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
eb86376
|
Money is a very pleasant thing, Willie, and I think you can trade almost anything for it wisely except the work you really want to do. If you sell out your time for a comfortable life, and give up your natural work, I think you lose the exchange. There remains an inner uneasiness that spoils the comforts.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
255354f
|
With the smoke of the dead sailor's cigar wreathing around him, Willie passed to thinking about death and life and luck and God. Philosophers are at home with such thoughts, perhaps, but for other people it is actual torture when these concepts--not the words, the realities--break through the crust of daily occurrences and grip the soul. A half hour of such racking meditation can change the ways of a lifetime.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
c503ade
|
She had learned from her encounter with Mike Eden that there really was more than one man in the world-the piece of knowledge that more than anything else divides women from girls.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
cd970f2
|
He's too clever to be wise, if that makes any sense. Very
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
ea51143
|
Boys fight the wars. We'd have the brotherhood of man tomorrow if the politicians had to get out and fight.
|
|
war
|
Herman Wouk |
|
f899807
|
I think appreciating Dickens goes with ten thousand in the bank.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
3334723
|
the nameless maiden in the advertisement was like a thousand other clothing models he had seen in magazines--arched brows, big eyes, angular cheeks, pouting mouth, a fetching figure, and a haughty, revolted look, as though someone had just offered her a jellyfish to hold.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
b7c2b33
|
the one loophole that military wisdom can never quite button up--the sympathy of the downtrodden for each other.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
46d096d
|
Tell me, Briny," Natalie said, "are you still having fun?" He looked around at the noisy, crowded, evil-smelling ward, where the Polish women were helplessly bringing new life into a city which was being dynamited to death by the Germans, going through unpostponable birth pangs with the best care the dying city could give them. "More fun than a barrel of monkeys."
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
a7a1813
|
Seventeen days before the end of the war, the minesweeper Caine finally swept a mine.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
b5e57c9
|
Your country baffles me: a luxurious unharmed lotus land in which great hordes of handsome dynamic people either wallow in deep gloom, or play like overexcited children, or fall to work like all the devils in hell, while the press steadily drones detestation of the government and despair of the system. I don't understand how America works, any more than Frances Trollope or Dickens did, but it's an ongoing miracle of sorts.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
ac58634
|
Can't stop a Nazi with a lawbook.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
0e5bfbc
|
Of course the Russians under Zhukov were
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
3cc0955
|
dithyramb coming to majestic life: a swarm of fresh seapower
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
a833248
|
Willie experienced the strange sensations of the first days of a new captain: a shrinking of his personal identiy, and a stretching out of his nerve ends to all the spaces and machinery of the ship. He was less free than before. He developed the apprehensive listening ears of a young mother; the ears listened on in his sleep; he never quite slept, not the way he had before.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
bc7cc56
|
don't make the mistake of skipping the Old Testament. It's the core of all religion, I
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
8e4e704
|
Please tell Field Marshal Goring for me, to stick his Swiss bank account up his fat ass.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
79ade53
|
Sir, my inferior understanding prevents my grasping the unquestionable soundness of the mission.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
cf41a5a
|
This game still had its old ritual fascination for Pug; he was following it tensely, smoking a cigar. Once his nostalgia had been keen for the tough youthful combat on the grass, the slamming of bodies, the tricky well-drilled plays, above all for the rare moments of breaking free and sprinting down the field, dodging one man and another with the stands around him a roaring sea of voices. Nothing in his life had since been quite like it. Bu..
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
ba0bebb
|
There are good and bad things in all political systems.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
bfa2117
|
Conformity is evil when it distorts, flattens, and erases fruitful ways, strong ideas, natural identities; it is evil when it is a steamroller. But a man cannot escape being part of a milieu--and a recognizable part--unless he flees naked to a cave, never to return.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
5754a43
|
The clear intent of our law is to enable a man to live in the world and yet hold his faith close to his daily thoughts.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
0b2f277
|
Al nations celebrate the day of their coming into being with a work stoppage and ceremonies. The Jews, who believe that God created the universe, celebrate its coming into being, and give thanks to its Maker, once a week.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
fa14d5b
|
The Jewish Sabbath may be too hard for some people, or they may not subscribe to its ideas; but within its own terms it is a dramatic ceremony penetrating all of life. It is not simply a day off. This demanding rite turns twenty-four hours of every week into a separated time, apart in mood, texture, acts, and events from daily existence.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
ecdaa74
|
It's occurred to me that our human values, our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, evolved in simpler times, before there were machines.
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |
|
9a79c4a
|
The Second Table of the Ten Commandments reads in Hebrew something like this: 'Don't kill; don't be vile; don't steal; don't tell lies about others; don't envy any man his wife or house or animals, or anything he has.' This sounds shockingly wrong in English. For the English genius, religion is solemn and stately; Canterbury Cathedral, not a shul. The grand slow march of "Thou Shalt Nots" is exactly right. Religion for the Jews is intimate ..
|
|
|
Herman Wouk |