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Old couples waving white flags of truce from windows of small white cars are exceedingly unthreatening, even in a place like Tal Afar in September 2004, where many of the young men were very dangerous, including and perhaps especially us.
the mass insanity of modern warfare.
the alleviation and prevention of human suffering in the face of its inevitability,
our collective self-deceptions
and I hope that we’ll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will.”
The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.
We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
“You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.
No art is possible without a dance with death,
Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”
The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel.
The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
“That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.”
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.
mournfully pregnant with patriotism and middle age and imaginary wisdom.
It was Fate, of course, which had costumed him—Fate, and a feeble will to survive.
One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.
