One-way Tickets Quotes

“We evolved living in tribes wandering the southern plains – groups of thirty or forty individuals who survived only by means of their shared goals and their ability to cooperate. Individual selfishness and greed were threats, and would have been ruthlessly punished; altruism and empathy, on the other hand, flourished because in those times they ensured that the group lasted another day, another month, another year. Each danger faced and overcome together tightened the bonds between the members of a tribe.”
― Peter Grainger, One-way Tickets

“Because the trauma isn’t what happened to you out there,’ – stabbing his finger quite correctly due east, Lane noted – ‘it’s ordinary bloody life. The real trauma is the daily grind after you’ve lived on the edge of the abyss for months or years on end. For one thing, it’s just boring. You can’t get worked up about office politics or traffic jams or a washing machine breaking down when you’ve stood and watched a mate of yours going on his hands and knees towards an IED…”
― Peter Grainger, One-way Tickets

“Sometimes we laughed so much it hurt. Crazy, isn’t it, when you’re surrounded by people who want to blow you to bits every single day?’ He waited, wanting her to answer that question, to say whether she thought it was or was not crazy to laugh like that in the face of imminent death. ‘The psychologists say it’s a coping mechanism, which is the sort of thing people in small rooms in universities you’ve never heard of usually come up with. I just think that when your life is on the line, you live it more – I don’t know. More something. More intensely? More fully?”
― Peter Grainger, One-way Tickets