Miles Watson > Miles's Quotes

“New York, I thought, was a city defined by its flaws. In every possible way, its virtues were overwhelmed by its vices, as Jekyll was by Hyde. Yet it was these very vices that gave the city its character - like tar in an oak barrel lending its flavor to Scotch.”
― Miles Watson

“I thought fleetingly of Anne, how the faces changed but the act was always the same, the need was always the same, no one drew a line between the sex you bought and the love you made, and your body could not tell the difference.”
― Miles Watson, Cage Life

“Kraut was a stand-up guy in the old tradition, in a strange way reminiscent of my father in his steadfast refusal to abandon a position once he had taken it. It was a quality I lacked, and so admired in others when they weren't using it to beat me to the canvas or break my heart.”
― Miles Watson, Cage Life

“The course she was on was as fixed and unalterable as the trajectory of a bullet, but you could see she did not believe that. No one in the life ever believed it. They saw a dozen, a hundred, a thousand people precede them into the trap, saw how unvarying and pitiless the end was, and with all that fresh in their minds they did the same, of their own free will.”
― Miles Watson, Cage Life

“He looked like an idol consecrated to the gods of arrogance. Damned if I would bow.”
― Miles Watson, Cage Life

“You have to understand something about girls, Mick. You see 'em in the winner's circle, but you'll never find horseshit on their shoes.”
― Miles Watson, Cage Life

“Hell is full of polite men with bone saws.”
― Miles Watson, The Shroud

“It wasn’t fair, but maybe Tommy was right on that score. Maybe a man didn’t have no right to ask for fair. Maybe a man made fair for himself.”
― Miles Watson, Pleas and Thank Yous

“In the years that I could not see him, I came to know my father through the medium of photography. My perceptions of him were forged on black-and-white squares that stole an instant out of history and immortalized it between the pages of a family album. When I summoned up the image of the man, it came to me frozen, black-bordered, flat. He stood pale above the creases of his uniform, framed in the foamy wake of some ship, drops of sunlight caught in the buttons on his jacket. He winked at me from the liberty ports of countless exotic places. In an atrocious hand he scrawled stilted, affectionate words to the stranger that bore his name and his features, telling of adventures far away, misbehavings under suns hotter than that which shone over the Greater German Reich.”
― Miles Watson, Shadows and Glory

“It is no easy thing to be in your mid-twenties and realize that, holy shit, this is it, this is as good as it gets, and from here it's all downhill, the fun's over, the hijinks have jinked their last, nothing lies ahead but drudgery and toil and a sagging belly and death. It's harder yet when a stupid bitch, a numbfuck cunt, one of those horrible sweet-smelling OMG types who wouldn't talk to you in high school and sure as fuck won't talk to you now, takes position on your elbow with a cell phone jammed into her cheek, yammering away. Because who wants to listen to the stream of shit coming out of her mouth? Gossip about friends. Gossip about enemies. Gossip about celebrities. Gossip about gossip. Not a thought in her head. Not a fact. Nothing of interest. Nothing of worth. Just an avalanche of verbal rubbish. The Patriots took on the Redcoats, the Blue fought the Gray, the National Guard stormed the beaches of Normandy, so this submoronic cretin could stand here in her designer boots and talk about what happened at the club last night.”
― Miles Watson, A Fever In The Blood

“No one knew much about the Twenty-Eighth Infantry. It was not a glamour outfit. They knew about the Big Red One and the Screaming Eagles, about the Eighty-Second Airborne and Hell On Wheels, but not about Twenty-Eighth Infantry. The name was met with a certain silence, as if he was in a room full of Harvard graduates and told them his degree was by correspondence.”
― Miles Watson, A Story Never Told

“The Jews are cowering along the wall, eyes wide, palms up, fingers splayed -- a collective posture of submission. Even now, with everything that has happened, with the city in ruins and the dead as thick upon the streets as busted glass, they don't want to believe we are actually going to kill them. We are Germans, after all; the most civilized people in Europe. And we are soldiers, not murderers. Except for today. Today we are both.”
― Miles Watson, The Action

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Is certainty proof of being right?”
― Miles Watson, Seelenmord

“Raus did not look up at the faces. An officer learned not to look at the faces. It was easier if you thought of them as bodies, as tools, means to an end. But just what the end was Raus could no longer say.”
― Miles Watson, Nosferatu

“But that was the war for you. It was inconvenient, senseless, and it had placed Maurice Mickelwhite directly in the path of two thousand German bombers.”
― Miles Watson, The Numbers Game

“Bloke was a savage. On the pitch and in the sky. But his savagery wouldn't save him. He had flown too many missions and the numbers would catch up with him soon. They always did.”
― Miles Watson, The Numbers Game

“Love? What's that? Preferring someone to someone else? If that's love, then yes, she loved you. Of course, if that's love...then I love you. At least for tonight.”
― Miles Watson, Knuckle Down

“Gene was six feet three inches of lean muscle and hard bone enclosing a brain that had only one object: the acquisition of power.”
― Miles Watson, Knuckle Down

“Pain could be controlled. Its debts could be deferred. But there were other debts that could not be deferred. Debts of honor. Debts of love.”
― Miles Watson, Knuckle Down

“Halleck came from people who regarded a slight change of facial expression as adequate to convey the pain of a severed limb.”
― Miles Watson, Sinner's Cross

“This cramped little space that stank of earth and smoke and sweat, that dripped water during every hard rain, and whose floor was often a half-frozen soup of mud and sunflower seeds and straw, now seemed to him more comfortable than Ketterling’s HQ could ever be, and he knew why. Here, surrounded by the weapons hanging from nails by their straps, the boxes of hand grenades, the cut-down artillery shells filled with cigarette butts, the crumpled moisture-bloated magazines and greasy playing cards, one lived an honest life. You couldn’t get that back home anymore. The radio and the newspapers were full of lies that would have been insulting even if the streets hadn’t been full of rubble and the air with the shriek of air-raid sirens, and it wasn’t enough for the government that the people merely endure it all, bombs and lies, without objecting. They had to believe the lies, had to parrot them back with sickly smiles plastered on their faces, lest they be branded defeatists and be taken away.

It wasn’t like that here. Nickolaus wanted it to be, but it wasn’t. Here, a man might be hungry, he might itch with lice, he might sting with pain from cuts that never healed, he might be empty-headed with fatigue and half-deafened from noise, but he always knew precisely where he stood—with his comrades and with the enemy. There were no intrigues, no politics, no flag-waving. A man never looked you in the eyes and told you black was white, or worse yet, demanded that you agree that black was white. There was no need because he had already asked you to die for him, and once you had agreed, what need was there for words?”
― Miles Watson, Sinner's Cross

“Breese was one of those people who thought of civilization as sitting atop the earth like a man on a throne, and not like a weed that had thrust itself up through a crack in the sidewalk.”
― Miles Watson, Sinner's Cross

“The bigger a man’s balls are out here, Lieutenant, the more likely they are to get shot off.”
― Miles Watson, Sinner's Cross

“We’ve been catching hell ever since we got to this forest. Christ, I’ve heard guys praying they’ll lose a leg just to get out of here. That’s not normal. I mean, you hear guys praying to get a Million Dollar Wound all the time—you know, lose a finger or a toe or get shot through the ass. Something that’ll fuck ‘em up bad enough to get ‘em sent home but not bad enough to cripple ‘em. That’s normal. I been hearing that since Anzio. But I never heard anybody pray to lose a fucking leg. Not before I came here.”
― Miles Watson, Sinner's Cross

“This is your platoon sergeant, Halleck. This is your platoon medic, Holzinger. This is your radioman, Loomis, and this is your call-sign, Decoy Red One Six. These are your squad leaders—Ryerson, Spicer, and Keesey. Tonight’s password is 'Ontario.' Your position extends from the edge of that gully to the blowdown over there. We don’t expect a push here, so your job is to keep the Germans from infiltrating. That means a one hundred percent alert all night, every night. Listen for the enemy. Don’t make any noise at all or you’ll take fire from both sides. Don’t smoke, the Germans will see the light and blow you to hell. Don’t fall asleep, you’ll wake up with your throat cut. Don’t give any orders, you don’t know what you’re doing. Let Halleck run things until you know the score. A guide will relieve you at 0630 hours exactly. If you hear anyone come up behind you before that, shoot him.”
― Miles Watson, Sinner's Cross

“A good platoon sergeant, in the lieutenant’s mind, ought act like Kato on 'The Green Hornet' and not a disapproving uncle with a taste for the strap.”
― Miles Watson, Sinner's Cross

“Just remember: when you lose, don't lose the lesson.”
― Miles Watson, Sinner's Cross

“I don’t want to saw I flew into her arms. I wasn’t in condition for flying. Or running. Or even dignified limping. I simply fell. Fell towards the center of gravity in my own personal universe. And if our lips met on my way down, was that any fault of mine?”
― Miles Watson, Knuckle Down

“We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.