Little Boy Quotes

“Lonely people have cruel thoughts.”
― John Smith, Little Boy

“Nobody is ever there to help you, he thought. They are there to process you. They are not there to solve the world for you, but to solve you for the world. And they are not there to bring your dreams to fruition, but to grind them out of you, slowly, meticulously, so that you will crawl and grovel, without complaining, without a single complaint, perhaps even with a few murmurs of obsequious gratitude, into a life you did not ask for, and to remain there, without thought of your old aspirations, the futures you have discarded, the lives you let slip, your old crazed hopes—to put all these aside, and to remain content, content to be anything but an inconvenience, to the great process.”
― John Smith, Little Boy

“They took him inside, where it was warm, and then they fed him, taking care to follow every detail of the instructions they had received from the Army, into an enormous machine.”
― John Smith, Little Boy

“All the time he had spent in institutions, sheltered from the world, when in reality there was no greater threat to him than the institutions themselves.”
― John Smith, Little Boy

“To clench one’s teeth, to be realistic, but not to compromise, to press on, in spite of the absolute weariness of the million inevitable failures of any great task—that is discipline.”
― John Smith, Little Boy

“To be—what? What to be? That is the question.”
― John Smith, Little Boy

“a million soldiers, small in stature, their mouths thrown wide in a rising song—a sudden blast of wind—fields of swooning swine—houses burst
into confetti”
― John Smith, Little Boy

“To extract a child from a shallow grave seems at first, to the casual observer, a ludicrously simple matter.”
― John Smith, Little Boy