R.J. MacDonald > R.J.'s Quotes

“Torpedo! Starboard side!” The lookout grasped the cold metal handrail tightly, his knuckles white, staring helplessly as a 20-foot torpedo, travelling at 60 feet per second, disappeared from his view to ram 400 pounds of high-explosive TNT-Hexanite into the majestic ocean passenger liner.”
― R.J. MacDonald, A Distant Field: A Novel of World War I

“Their schoolboy gang of friends had weathered the storms and squabbles of puberty, and now they were young men. Ready to join their fathers at work and in the pub, ready to court the girls they’d gone to school with, ready to try out for the local hurling team, ready to become adults—but there was always time for fishing. Some things just had to take priority.”
― R.J. MacDonald, A Distant Field: A Novel of World War I

“Harris looked up at the sky and then stared at Stuart. “The sun will set soon. Follow Lieutenant Morley to the aid station.”
“I’m all right, Sergeant. I want to stay with my brother.”
Harris looked Stuart up and down. “You’re covered in blood.”
Stuart looked Harris up and down. “So are you, Ser- geant.”
Harris looked at his own uniform and pursed his lips. “Good point; well made. All right, stay if you want.”
― R.J. MacDonald, A Distant Field: A Novel of World War I

“World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorsa for the son she has given.”
― Mary Rinehart

“In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

“If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree. ”
― Michael Crichton