My War Gone By, I Miss It So Quotes

“Respect for the dead comes second to respect for the living, and I believe no man's demise exempts him from culpability.”
― Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So

“Men and women who venture to someone else’s war through choice do so in a variety of guises. UN general, BBC correspondent, aid worker, mercenary: in the final analysis they all want the same thing, a hit off the action, a walk on the dark side. It’s just a question of how slick a cover you give yourself, and how far you want to go. If you find a cause later then hold on to it, but never blind yourself with your own disguise. I”
― Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So

“There are two ways to die here,’ the fighter concluded. ‘You can die doing the right thing for the wrong reason, or die doing the wrong thing for the right reason.”
― Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So

“But if you stuck around long enough at the time, the dead and wounded piled up so quickly they squeezed one another off the narrow platforms of your memory.”
― Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So

“Alive she was strikingly pretty. Dead she was so beautiful you could have raised an army to sack Troy just for possession of her casket”
― Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So

“But it was not what people lost in Bosnia that you noticed in their eyes, it was what some of them gained. Whether it is your own or someone else’s, the taste of evil leaves an indelible mark on the iris.”
― Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So

“Word had come from Sarajevo, in the corpulent form of the overall commander, General Rasim Delić, to halt all military operations and abide by the Dayton ceasefire. Streams of 502 troops poured back to Sanski Most as fresh soldiers took over the lines. It was over.
The war was over.
Over?”
― Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So

“Evil: if I had encountered it before then it was so well disguised that I saw it
as something else – an old woman walking alone down a track crying; a
distant plume of smoke from a village in the hills; dead-eyed soldiers
stepping down a road in silence – banal details of its hidden tread. Even the
killings I had seen so far seemed no more than the brutish product of the
war’s rationale: men did bad things – it was in their nature. Words like
‘wicked’ and ‘evil’ had a medieval ring to them, a throwback to
superstition and the histrionics of the pulpit. I have no personal God and
mostly feel in no position to judge individual actions as either ‘good’ or
‘evil’. Yet I am certain that what I witnessed at times in Vareš was more
than mere wrongdoing.”
― Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So

“Officialdom needs to put you in a categorizing box, and if it cannot then it is free to make its own verdict upon your status,”
― Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So

“We lived together for a long time,’ he said, looking out of a crack-spangled window, ‘we have no need to fight.’ I bet he is dead now. He had the vulnerable purity and courage that would ensure he was among the first to get whacked on the front.”
― Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So

“Momilo had once explained to me the mentality of Bosnia’s killers in a few short words: ‘In the morning they hate themselves, in the afternoon the world.’ So, Momilo, where are you now?”
― Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So

“Mojim drugovima – For my comrades”
― Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So