Life During Wartime Quotes

“The effort mined a core of dizziness inside him. He resisted it, but then realizing that there was nothing attractive about consciousness, nothing he cared to know about the someone in charge of death and butterflies, he let himself go spiraling down past layers of darkness and shining wings, darkness and mystical light, and a memory of pain so bright that it became a white darkness wherein he lost all track of being.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“The scene was horrid, yet it had the purity of a stanza from a ballad come to life, a ballad composed about tragic events in some border hell.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“Even the serenity he felt was something that needed to be understood; it seemed a symptom of a deeper and more complete understanding that lay yet beyond him.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“Don’t you see the inevitability of this moment? I mean we’re talking serious process here, man. The perfect critic stepping forth from the demimonde of the war and blowing the heart of the painting to rubble, and then turning his weapon on the man whose actions have been the pure contrary of the work’s formal imperative.’ ‘I’m outta film,’ said the mestizo cameraman.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“His thoughts came and went one at a time, without logical attachments or chains of causation, like hawks circling an empty sky. [...] And from their isolation, their profound disunity, he concluded that a mind was not something grown or evolved, but was a mosaic, a jackdaw’s nest of baubles and bits of glass between which lightning flickered now and again, connecting and establishing the whole for fractions of seconds, creating the illusion of a man, of a man’s rational and emotional convictions. Years before, months before, he might have denied this conception, put forward a romantic conception in its stead. But the constituency of his mind, his jackdaw’s nest, had changed, with war and prostitutes replacing home-cooking and girlfriends, and though a younger Mingolla would have rejected the bleakness of this self-knowledge, the current one found in it a source of strength, a justification for conscienceless action, for contempt of sentiment.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime