Quote collection
798 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Maybe...you'll fall in love with me all over again." "Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?" "Yes. I want to ruin you." "Good," I said. "That's what I want too."
"It could be worse,' Passini said respectfully. "There is nothing worse than war." Defeat is worse." I do not believe it," Passini said still respectfully. "What is defeat? You go home."
"That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch."
"There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates."
"I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless."
"Rereading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere."
"I do not want you ever to initiate any action for any refunds of taxes without first consulting me and presenting the matter fully to me so that I may judge whether it is an honorable and ethical action to take, not simply legally, but according to my own personal standards."
"The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would distrust a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it."
"Everybody has something wrong with them."
"Everybody is friends when things are bad enough."
"A big lie is more plausible than truth."
"When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it."
"You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood"
"Writing is a hard business...but nothing makes you feel better."
"Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder."
"Cowards die a thousand deaths, but the brave only die once."
"The writer's job is not to judge, but to seek to understand."
"Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it. Financial security then is a great help as it keeps you from worrying."
"In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain."
"A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it is such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it."