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4c886c1 We soldiers knew next to nothing about what was going on in the centres of power. We received so many orders and counter-orders that there were times when we did not obey any of them at all, knowing that they were likely to be countermanded almost immediately. soldiers war ww2 ww2-books Louis de Bernières
5b629a3 "There will never again be men like them," said Carreen softly. "No one can take their places." loss men war Margaret Mitchell
574d693 "It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too." -- healing music peace war Kate Atkinson
1f50e68 I am going to be Queen of England,' I protest. 'You make it sound like a battle to the death.' 'It is a battle to the death,' she says simply. 'That is what it means to be Queen of England. You are not Melusina, rising from a fountain to easy happiness. You will not be a beautiful woman at court with nothing to do but make magic. The road you have chosen will mean that you have to spend your life scheming and fighting. Our task, as your family, is to make sure you win. historical romance war Philippa Gregory
ec14880 During the war, I promised the dead I would never forget them. I stared at them, barely able to move myself. Pretended I was one of them. To this day I can recall the light in the ruins. ruins war Chris Bohjalian
1f287da It gives the war a whole new dimension, you know, hearing from someone right there in the thick of it. They really connected with it.' 'Maybe it reminds them of school,' she suggests. 'Didn't someone describe the trenches as ninety-nine per cent boredom and one per cent terror?' 'I don't know about boredom. God, the chaos of it, the brutality. And it's so vivid. I'd definitely be interested in reading his poetry, if only to see how he can go from describing, you know, people getting their guts blown out, to writing about love.' 'Maybe it's not that much of a leap,' she says. love poetry war Paul Murray
ec57fbd More or less everyone has lost someone, whatever side they belong to. war Carlos Ruiz Zafón
1e49912 "Perche finche la guerra e altrove, non riesci a prenderla sul serio. Come ha detto Martha Gellhorn "La guerra e un fatto personale". E proprio cosi: finche non capita a te, non riesci a capirla, tanto meno a immaginarla. Finche non entra nella tua vita e irreale" reality war Lucy Foley
ed66f49 ?Sabes cual es la leccion mas importante d ela historia? Que solo la escriben los vencedores. Esa es la leccion. El que decide el rumbo de la historia es el que gana. historia history war Anthony Doerr
5fae640 Perhaps war was due to fear: to fear of reliability. Unless there was truth, and unless people told the truth, there was always danger in everything outside the individual. You told the truth to yourself, but you had no surety for your neighbour. This uncertainty must end by making the neighbour a menace. politics war T. H. White
ee160d2 "We could unleash all this technology at once. You can imagine what would happen then. But that's not the interesting thing." "What is the interesting thing?" "The interesting thing is that we have a moral sense. It is on punched cards, perhaps the most advanced and sensitive moral sense the world has ever known." "Because it is on punched cards?" "It considers all considerations in endless and subtle detail," he said. "It even quibbles. With this great new moral tool, how can we go wrong? I confidently predict that, although we could employ all this splendid new weaponry I've been telling you about, we're not going to do it." war Donald Barthelme
f7ab16f My mother told stories - of their life in the war and how she'd played the accordion in the air-raid shelter and it had got rid of the rats. Apparently rats like violins and pianos but they can't stand the accordion . . . air-raid rats war Jeanette Winterson
3de4ee4 "...Father dislikes weaponry of any sort. " "Yes, he's even suspicious of Mother's knitting scissors," Barnaby B pointed out. "He feels all warfare should be conducted with taunts and gibes and vicious rumors." rumors taunts war warfare weapons Lois Lowry
1ced81f Be one of many. Be sure that they never have reason to remember your face. war Lois Lowry
8a6a617 Civilians seldom understand that soldiers, once impressed into war, will forever take it for the ordinary state of the world, with all else illusion. The former soldier assumes that when time weakens the dream of civilian life and its supports pull away, he will revert to the one state that will always hold his heart. He dreams of war and remembers it in quiet times when he might otherwise devote himself to different things, and he is ruined for the peace. What he has seen is as powerful and mysterious as death itself, and yet he has not died, and he wonders why. war Mark Helprin
3ced8e9 There were no weapons of mass destruction. And we bombed them anyway. And, by the way he's destroyed the economy. He's squandered something in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars. It seems impossible to Tyler that that might not matter. It drives him insane. bush economy election george-w-bush insanity politics president w war weapons-of-mass-destruction Michael Cunningham
790b6d8 "Jack Reed, whom The New York Times had labeled "the Bolshevik agitator," hesitated and then equivocated on the stand. But by then the defense of The Masses was plain: criticism of the government didn't amount to a desire to overthrow it. If all hostile opinion were suppressed, how could Americans believe they lived in a free country? Dissent was a safeguard to freedom, not an impediment." -- independence liberty philosophy politics war Nancy Milford
112354c "Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals. The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution, itself inspired by the French Revolution. The French regime could not allow its lucrative Santo Domingo to go free, and would not allow the Haitian people to live within the realm of the Enlightenment's " Rights of Man." The Haitians nonetheless triumphed, and Haiti became the first modern colony to win its independence. The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home emptyhanded. As a sleight of hand, the French government tried to maintain sovereignty over its colonies by repackaging them as " overseas territories." A people hungry for liberation did not want such measly hors d'oeuvres." global-south imperialism independence third-world war Vijay Prashad
1287411 Dr. Soekarno was always exactly what he was in the beginning, a whizz-bang demagogue, an opportunist, just another little dictator. U.S. officialdom never tires of backing that type. Nor does U.S. officialdom take sufficient note of the writing on the wall, such as: Down With All Whites. I wonder what the phrase looks like in Vietnamese. indonesia java martha-gellhorn war Martha Gellhorn
71a907a After all, you can't really blame the Waffen S.S. for doing what comes naturally. But a funny thing happened on the way to the moral high ground. nazis ss waffen-ss war Garth Ennis
ae682ac "Absage Lieber von einem Faschisten erschlagen werden Als selber Faschist sein! Lieber von einem Kommunisten erschlagen werden Als selber Kommunist sein! Wir haben den Krieg nicht vergessen. Wir wissen, Wie das berauscht, wenn man Trommel und Pauke ruhrt. Wir sind taub, wir werden nicht mitgerissen, Wenn ihr das Volk mit dem alten Rauschgift verfuhrt. Wir sind weder Soldaten noch Weltverbesserer mehr, Wir glauben nicht, dass "an unserem Wesen Die Welt musse genesen". Wir sind arm, wir haben Schiffbruch gelitten, Wir glauben alle an die hubschen Phrasen nicht mehr, Mit denen man uns in den Krieg gepeitscht und geritten - Auch die Euren, rote Bruder, sind Zauber und fuhren zu Krieg und Gas! Auch Eure Fuhrer sind Generale, Kommandieren, schreien und organisieren, Wir aber, wir hassen das, Wir trinken den Fusel nicht mehr, Wir wollen Herz und Vernunft nicht verlieren, Nicht unter roten noch weissen Fahnen marschieren. Lieber wollen wir einsam als "Traumer" verderben Oder unter Euren blutigen Bruderhanden sterben, Als irgend ein Partei- und Machtgluck geniessen war Hermann Hesse
bd09341 You make peace with one sister only to declare war on the other. It's always like that with peace, isn't it? Always to someone's detriment, already sowing the seed for the next war. fairy-tales fantasy peace portal-fantasy war war-and-peace young-adult young-adult-fantasy Cornelia Funke
39c2e49 1. The desperate Jews - their spirits in my lap as we sat on the roof, next to the steaming chimneys. 2. The Russian soldiers - taking only small amounts of ammunition, relying on the fallen for the rest of it. 3. The soaked bodies of a French coast - beached on the shingle and sand. souls war Markus Zusak
3f639df On the ration cards of Nazi Germany, there was no listing for punishment, but everyone had to take their turn. For some it was death in a foreign country during the war. For others it was poverty and guilt when the war was over, when six million discoveries were made throughout Europe. jews punishment war Markus Zusak
d420301 The heart of evil beats in Afghanistan. When men hold every advantage, neither wealth, nor beauty, nor intelligence, nor education, nor strength, nor family can compete with gender. Women have only prayer and hope as allies. boys evil feminism hope prayer rights war women Jean Sasson
cebf249 The recruits of 1914 have the look of ghosts. They are queuing up to be slaughtered: they are already dead. ghosts soldiers somme war Geoff Dyer
809b886 I am not speaking strictly of slavery here, but of that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable--that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt. Slavery is just the logical end-point, the most extreme from of such disentanglement. But for that reason it provides us with a window on the process as a whole. What's more, owing to its historical role, slavery has shaped our basic assumptions and institutions in ways that we are no longer aware of and whose influence we would probably never wish to acknowledge if we were. If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away. It's still there, lodged in our most intimate conceptions of honor, property, even freedom. It's just that we can no longer see that it's there. capitalism commercial-markets conquest debt property slavery social-imagination war David Graeber
9981143 ...these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets. war Azar Nafisi
f74874d Buddhism spreads by people converting out of their own wish for peace and right action. But power condenses around those willing to use force. peace power religion war Kim Stanley Robinson
0d24b51 "We are all ghosts," Morris Klapper said at last. "We are conceived in a moment of death and born out of ghost wombs, and we play in the streets with other little ghosts, chanting ghost-rhymes and scratching to become real. We are told that life is full of goals and that, although it is sadly necessary to fight, you can at least choose your war. But we learn that for ghosts there can only be one battle: to become real. A few of us make it, thus encouraging other ghosts to believe it can be done." ghosts goals morris-klapper necessary-to-fight real to-become-real war Peter S. Beagle
fcf4989 The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it's said, even know they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way that they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War. futility-of-war war Thomas Pynchon
d5b786c Those who suffer terrible wars have a finer sense of when they begin and when they end. korea korean-war military-history war war-history Bruce Cumings
ae83c22 Oni nesli sobstvennye zhizni. Na nikh chudovishchno davili pogoda i stress. Na poslepoludennoi zhare oni snimali kaski i bronezhilety, shli nalegke, chto bylo opasno, no pomogalo sbrosit' napriazhenie. Chasto na marshe oni ot chego-to izbavlialis'. Udobstva radi, oni vykidyvali sukhie paiki, podryvali granaty i <> -- naplevat', ved' k nochi vertolety privezut eshche, a potom paru dnei spustia eshche i eshche: svezhie arbuzy i iashchiki s boepripasami, solnechnymi ochkami i sherstianymi sviterami... Neistoshchimost' resursov porazhala: feierverki na chetvertoe iiulia, krashenye iaitsa na Paskhu. Eto zhe velikii amerikanskii voennyi biudzhet: dary nauki i konveierov, konservnykh zavodov i arsenalov Khartforda, lesov Minnesoty i beskrainikh polei pshenitsy i kukuruzy... Vsio eto oni nesli, kak gruzovye poezda. Oni nesli eto na svoikh spinakh i plechakh, i pri vsekh dvusmyslennostiakh V'etnama, pri vsekh ego zagadkakh i peremennykh, neizmenno ostavalas' kak minimum odna neprelozhnaia istina: im vechno budet chto nesti. vietnam-war war Tim O'Brien
7bcb2e9 Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February? protest war weather Rebecca Goldstein
aea5ab4 Well, I once recall an old master sergeant once telling me that NCOs look after the men so that officers can figure out how to get them killed. That's the difference between maintenance and command. killed maintenance military ncos officers war Garth Ennis
d7a12ec What the war did to the dreamers. war Anthony Doerr
98e0ef9 It was this war and not World War II which established a far-flung American base structure abroad and a national security state at home, as defence spending nearly quadrupled in the last six months of 1950, and turned the United States in the policeman of the world. military-history the-korean-war war war-history Bruce Cumings
b18647d For DeHaven it was well worth the extra money to a federal budget that had always allocated more to war than it ever did to peaceful purposes. For a fraction of the cost of one missile he could purchase on the open market every work the library needed to round out its rare books collection. Yet politicians believed that missiles kept you safe, whereas actually books did, and for a simple reason. Ignorance caused wars, and people who read widely were seldom ignorant. ignorance library war David Baldacci
6dae2e9 "They're strange, those wars. Full of blood and violence - but full of stories that are equally difficult to fanthom. "It's true," people will mutter. "I don't care if you don't belive me. It was the fox who saved my life" or, "They died on either side of me and I was left standing there, the only one without a bullet between my eyes. Why me? Why me and not them?" war Markus Zusak
d873e98 Don't worry about me, no matter what happens. We're nervous here, but not afraid. We have all looked into our souls, one way or another, and are content to die if need be. The only thing left to say is that I love you. war Mark Helprin
c8f60b8 Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn't be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out. That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress. war war-profiteering Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
9e12bbe War is now a form of TV entertainment war Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
3796708 My stol'ko voevali, i vse radi togo, chtoby nam ne perekrasili doma v goluboi tsvet (<>, G.G. Markes) свобода-выбора война war Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
134defa Stick-thin, alabaster-pale Etienne LeBlanc runs down the rue de Dinan with Madame Ruelle, the baker's wife, on his heels: the least-robust rescue ever assembled. resistance war Anthony Doerr
f7b8b79 In my world death was like a nameless and incomprehensible hand, a door-to-door salesman who took away mothers, beggars, or ninety-year-old neighbors, like a hellish lottery. But I couldn't absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred, that death could be dressed in a uniform or raincoat, queue up at the cinema, laugh in bars, or take his children out for a walk to Ciudadela Park in the morning, and then, in the afternoon, make someone disappear in the dungeons of Montjuic Castle or in a common grave with no name or ceremony. war Carlos Ruiz Zafón
728171f It was the fact that I didn't want to kill anyone. I wasn't put on this earth to murder my fellow man. I'd grown up with violence - can't you see that? I can't bear it. war John Boyne
6d0d702 Psychology is a soft weapon but you can take out more enemy battalions with leaflets and radio broadcasts than with high explosives. war Nelson DeMille
95d2033 His strike force stood around him, craning their necks, in awe of the massive emptiness all around. He was almost sorry to pull his attention back to the small, vaguely intimate necessities of violence. regret space violence war James S.A. Corey
1a0d5db "Birds of the Western Front Your mess-tin cover's lost. Kestrels hover above the shelling. They don't turn a feather when hunting-ground explodes in yellow earth, flickering star-shells and flares from the Revelation of St John. You look away from artillery lobbing roar and suck and snap against one corner of a thicket to the partridge of the war zone making its nest in shattered clods. History floods into subsoil to be blown apart. You cling to the hard dry stars of observation. How you survive. They were all at it: Orchids of the Crimea nature notes from the trench leaving everything unsaid - hell's cauldron with souls pushed in, demons stoking flames beneath - for the pink-flecked wings of a chaffinch flashed like mediaeval glass. You replace gangrene and gas mask with a dream of alchemy: language of the birds translating human earth to abstract and divine. While machine-gun tracery gutted that stricken wood you watched the chaffinch flutter to and fro through splintered branches, breaking buds and never a green bough left. Hundreds lay in there wounded. If any, you say, spotted one bird they may have wondered why a thing with wings would stay in such a place. She must have, sure, had chicks she was too terrified to feed, too loyal to desert. Like roots clutching at air you stick to the lark singing fit to burst at dawn sounding insincere above the burning bush: plough-land latticed like folds of brain with shell-ravines where nothing stirs but black rats, jittery sentries and the lice sliding across your faces every night. Where every elixir's gone wrong you hold to what you know. A little nature study. A solitary magpie blue and white spearing a strand of willow. One for sorrow. One for Babylon, Ninevah and Northern France, for mice and desolation, the burgeoning war western-front Ruth Padel
a36e231 "In January 1943, there appeared in a Negro newspaper this "Draftee's Prayer": Dear Lord, today I go to war: To fight, to die, Tell me what for? Dear Lord, I'll fight, I do not fear, Germans or Japs; My fears are here. America!" fear war Howard Zinn
92eb28d - A! Te wojne bedzie warto zobaczyc... Zadnego pijanego rzucania sie do gardel bandytow-imbecyli... - Moja matka by zwariowala! - powiedziala Sylwia. - Bynajmniej - odparl. - To ja podnieci, o ile dozyje. excite parade-s-end some-do-not sylvia-tietjens war Ford Madox Ford
191bec9 The Mexicans had fired the first shot. But they had done what the American government wanted, according to Colonel Hitchcock, who wrote in his diary, even before those first incidents: I have said from the first that the United States are the aggressors. . . We have not one particle of right to be here. . . It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses, for, whatever becomes of this army, there is no doubt of war between the United States and Mexico. . . My heart is not in this business. . . but, as a military man, I am bound to execute orders. military war Howard Zinn
3357093 Hungry men are not known for their patience or their kindness. patience-kindness pestilence war Karen Essex
92431b7 "Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites. past war Richard Flanagan
dd1505c "I remember my father telling me about England's redrawing of India's boundaries when it became independent. They wanted to separate the Hindu from the Muslim, but they used outdated maps. Twelve million people had to relocate because the Brits screwed it up so badly. And a half million people died during the resulting chaos. And before that, Iraq was unilaterally cobbled together, causing many of the conflicts we see today. There are dozens of such examples. The strong countries smashing the weaker ones and then avoiding responsibility later for the very problems they caused." "You keep proving my point, Tom, that we're rotten to the core." "My point is we never learn!" religion war David Baldacci
8ba30b9 I ain't gonna kill; it's against my will. . . . killing war Howard Zinn
9e75607 Love and war are exactly alike. It is lawful to use tricks and slights to obtain a desired end. war Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
301d845 "Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear." -When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" dacca indo pakistani war Jhumpa Lahiri
bcd8c37 he inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn't more or less relinquished poetry by then. war Kate Atkinson
9f9076c What was a prisoner of war anyway? Less than a man, just material to be used to make the railway, like the teak sleepers and steel rails and dog spikes. war Richard Flanagan
4d8b748 They can march for days without eating. They impregnate every schoolgirl they meet. war Anthony Doerr
84d58d7 Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. manliness war Tim O'Brien
90db710 Kogda umiraet chelovek, polozheno vinit' kogo-to ili chto-to. Dzhimmi Kross eto ponimal. Mozhno vinit' voinu. Mozhno vinit' idiotov, kotorye voinu razviazali. Mozhno vinit' Kaiovu za to, chto na nee poshel. Mozhno vinit' dozhd'. Mozhno vinit' reku. Mozhno vinit' pole, griaz', klimat. Mozhno vinit' vraga. Mozhno vinit' artilleriiskie snariady. Mozhno vinit' liudei, kotorye polenilis' prochest' gazetu, kotorym naskuchili ezhednevnye soobshcheniia o chisle pogibshikh, kotorye perekliuchaiut kanaly pri odnom tol'ko upominanii politiki. Mozhno vinit' tselye narody. Mozhno vinit' Boga. Mozhno vinit' proizvoditelei oruzhiia ili Karla Marksa, zluiu sud'bu ili starika v Omakhe, zabyvshego progolosovat'. No posredi polia prichiny vsegda neposredstvennye. Minutnaia nebrezhnost', ili oshibochnoe suzhdenie, ili obychnaia glupost' imeiut posledstviia, kotorye dliatsia vechno. war Tim O'Brien
2cda6ff It was this war and not World War II which established a far-flung American base structure abroad and a national security state at home, as defence spending nearly quadrupled in the last six months of 1950, and turned the United States into the policeman of the world. korea military-history the-korean-war war war-history Bruce Cumings
f34d058 Yes, they'd lost. But it was just a battle, not the war. star-wars war Timothy Zahn
5d820a8 The trenches', wrote Robert Kee fifty years later, 'were the concentration camps of the First World War'; and though the analogy is what an academic reviewer would call unhistorical, there is something Treblinka-like about almost all accounts of July 1st, about those long docile lines of young men, shoddily uniformed, heavily burdened, numbered about their necks, plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination inside the barbed wire. Accounts of the Somme produce in readers and audiences much the same emotions as do descriptions of the running of Auschwitz - guilty fascination, incredulity, horror, disgust, pity and anger - and not only from the pacific and tender-hearted; not only from the military historian, on whom, as he recounts the extinction of this brave effort or that, falls an awful lethargy, his typewriter keys tapping leadenly on the paper to drive the lines of print, like the waves of a Kitchener battalioon failing to take its objective, more and more slowly towards the foot of the page; but also from professional soldiers [...] Why did the commanders not do something about it? Why did they let the attack go on? why did they not stop one battalion following in the wake of another to join it in death? war wwi John Keegan
859c4b7 Tenemos putrefactores, plagas y oxidos capaces de atacar su alfabeto. Estos son la leche. Tenemos un producto quimico para encoger sus cabanas que penetra las fibras del bambu provocando que las chozas asfixien a sus ocupantes. Esto funciona solo despues de las diez de la noche, cuando la gente duerme. Sus matematicas estan a merced de un supurante numero sordo que hemos inventado. Tenemos una familia de peces entrenados para atacar a sus peces.Tenemos el mortal telegrama destructor de testiculos. Las companias de telecomunicaciones estan colaborando con el proyecto. Tenemos una sustancia verde que, bueno, mejor no hablo de esto. humor war Donald Barthelme
189c935 The implications of the true story are existential and corrosive to our larger national myth. To understand that the most costly war in this country's history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that this war was the product of centuries of enslavement, which is to see an even longer, more total war, is to alter the accepted conception of America as a beacon of freedom. How does one face this truth or forge a national identity out of it? freedom mythology race race-relations racism slavery war Ta-Nehisi Coates
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