The Yellow Birds Quotes

“There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told and what is true.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“All pain is the same. Only the details are different.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“Freedom is not the same as lack of accountability.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“You want to fall, that's all. You think it can't go on like that. It's as if your life is a perch on the edge of a cliff and going forward seems impossible, not for a lack of will, but a lack of space. The possibility of another day stands in defiance of the laws of physics. And you can't go back. So you want to fall, let go, give up, but you can't. And every breath you take reminds you of that fact. So it goes.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn’t any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you’re taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sign posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever and yeah they might have been trying to kill you too, so you say, What are you goona do?, but really it doesn’t matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing you could have done, and the one person you promised would live is dead, and you have seen all things die in more manners than you’d like to recall and for a while the whole thing fucking ravaged your spirit like some deep-down shit, man, that you didn’t even realize you had until only the animals made you sad, the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells and the fucking guts of everything stinking like metal and burning garbage and you walk around and the smell is deep down into you now and you say, How can metal be so on fire? and Where is all this fucking trash coming from? and even back home you’re getting whiffs of it and then that thing you started to notice slipping away is gone and now it’s becoming inverted, like you have bottomed out in your spirit but yet a deeper hole is being dug because everybody is so fucking happy to see you, the murderer, the fucking accomplice, that at-bare-minimum bearer of some fucking responsibility, and everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want to burn the whole goddamn country down, you want to burn every yellow ribbon in sight, and you can’t explain it but it’s just, like, Fuck you, but then you signed up to go so it’s your fault, really, because you went on purpose, so you are in the end doubly fucked, so why not just find a spot and curl up and die and let’s make it as painless as possible because you are a coward and, really, cowardice got you into this mess because you wanted to be a man and people made fun of you and pushed you around in the cafeteria and the hallways in high school because you liked to read books and poems sometimes and they’d call you a fag and really deep down you know you went because you wanted to be a man and that’s never gonna happen now and you’re too much of a coward to be a man and get it over with so why not find a clean, dry place and wait it out with it hurting as little as possible and just wait to go to sleep and not wake up and fuck ‘em all.”
― kevin powers, The Yellow Birds

“I wanted something that I could look back on and say, yes, you were fighting too, you burned to be alive, and whatever failure or accident of nature caused you to be killed could be explained by something other than the fact that I'd missed your giving up.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“To say what happened, the mere facts, the disposition of events in time, would come to seem like a kind of treachery. The dominoes of moments, lined up symmetrically, then tumbling backward against the hazy and unsure push of cause, showed only that a fall is every object's destiny. It is not enough to say what happened. Everything happened. Everything fell.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“To understand the world, one’s place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“All choices are illusions, or if they are not illusions their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all the other men and women deciding anything in that moment.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what is thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn't much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history. At least that's what I thought. Now I know: All pain is the same. Only the details are different.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn't mind. The world makes liars of us all.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“The details of the world in which we live are always secondary to the fact that we must live in them.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“...what it had indexed to was only an idea of a place, an abstraction formed from memories too brief and passing to account for the small effects of time: wind scouring and lifting the dust of the plains of Nineveh in immeasurable increments, the tuck of a river farther into its bend, hour by hour, year by year; the map would become less and less a picture of fact and more a poor translation of memory in two dimensions. It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn't much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“We'd had small lives, populated by a longing for something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“...the war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“I've come to accept that parts of life are constant, that just because something happens on two different days doesn't make it a goddamn miracle.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“I didn't want to be responsible for him. I had enough to worry about. I was disintegrating, too. How was I supposed to keep us both in tact?”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“A report had asked us what combat felt like...It's like a car accident. You know? That instant between knowing that it's gonna happen and actually slamming into the other car. Feels pretty helpless actually, like you've been riding along same as always, then it's there staring you in the face and you don't have the power to do shit about it”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“And now I know the extent of Sterling's bravery. It was narrowly focused, but it was pure and unadulterated. I twas a kind of elemental self-sacrifice, free of ideology, free of logic. He would put himself on the gallows in another boy's place for no other reason than that he thought the noose was better suited to his neck.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“There was no center to the world. The curves of all our bells are cracked.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“I smelled the clean house
and the wood-frame bed. It was all filler. The noise, the sound, they existed
just to take up space. My muscles flexed into the emptiness I still called home.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“I understood. Being from a place where a few facts are enough to define you, where a few habits can fill a life, causes a unique kind of shame. We'd had small lives, populated by a longing from something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams. So we'd come here, where life needed no elaboration and others would tell us who to be.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“People are going to die," he said flatly. "It's statistics." Then he got up and left the room.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“Her grief was dignified and hidden, as is most grief, which is partly why there is always so much of it to go around.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“I had the feeling that if I encountered anyone they would intuit my disgrace and would judge me instantly. Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history. At least that's what I thought. Now I know: all pain is the same. Only the details are different.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“Clouds spread out over the Atlantic like soiled linens on an unmade bed.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“His English was exceptional. There was a glottal sound in his voice, but it was not harsh. I'd often asked him to help me with my sparse Arabic, trying to get my pronunciation of this or that word right. "Shukran." "Afwan." "Qumbula." Thank you. You're welcome. Bomb.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds