War Dead Quotes

“In the First World War we lost in all about three million killed. In the Second we lost twenty million (so Khrushchev said; according to Stalin it was only seven million. Was Nikita being too generous? Or couldn't Iosif keep track of his capital?) All those odes! All those obelisks and eternal flames! Those novels and poems! For a quarter of a century all Soviet literature has been drunk on that blood!”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“These boys would be better off hog-tied than playing for a woman!” shouted another. The discordant men gathered at the back exit. Moonshiner opened the door and they poured out, while inside we could hear in the distance the sound of a plane flying into our airfield. We knew another body was likely on board, this time carrying the remains of a soldier from a neighboring town.”
― Marjorie Herrera Lewis, When the Men Were Gone

“it would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the century's war dead. . . . he saw himself walking the Mall in Washington, D.C., and the whole park from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial was dotted with the black Vs of Vietnam Memorials, as if a flock of giant stealth birds had landed on it. All night he walked past black wing walls, moving west toward the white tomb on the river.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Remaking History and Other Stories

“a streetlight reflected off the black cobblestones . . . in such a way that there were thousands of brief white squiggles underfoot, looking like names engraved on black granite, as if the whole surface of the earth were paved by a single memorial.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Remaking History and Other Stories

“smoking kills
and killing smokes.”
― Roy Duffield, Bacchus Against the Wall