Phil Klay Quotes

Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.

If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.

War is hell.

War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.

The first time I experienced war, I thought the world was ending.

The town caught fire in several places, shells crashed and burst, and solid shot rained like hail.

War is the ultimate reality-based horror show.

To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences.

War is horrible because it strangles youth.

War is hell. Hollywood fantasizes about it and makes it look good... war sucks.

There's nothing glamorous about war at all.

War is about dead people.

When we got down from the ambulances there were sharp cracks about us as bursts of shrapnel splashed down upon the Town Hall square. Dead soldiers lay outside and I glanced at them coldly. We were in search of the living.

There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

I've got cut half in two, once, and blowed up a time or two, but nothing permanent.

I have seen heroics - soldiers saving other soldiers' lives - and horrors.

The ground was strewn with the dead, the dying, and the wounded—here lay one man with his leg shot off, there another with a wound in his head, another with an arm shot off, and hundreds wounded in nearly all the various parts of the body.

I have been through one war. I have seen the dead piled up and I do not want to see another.

There is many a boy here to-day who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell

There's nothing good that comes out of war. It's simply hell on earth, and people survive, and people don't.

Bones inside clothes. That was war to me.

Despite all the videos you see from the Ministry of Defence or the Pentagon, and all the sanitised language describing smart bombs and pinpoint strikes, the scene on the ground has remained remarkably the same for hundreds of years. Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers children.

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

And Hermione was struggling to her feet in the wreckage, and three red-headed men were grouped on the ground where the wall had blasted apart. Harry grabbed Hermione's hand as they staggered and stumbled over stone and wood. 'No - no - no!' someone was shouting. 'No! Fred! No!' And Percy was shaking his brother, and Ron was kneeling beside them, and Fred's eyes stared without seeing, the ghost of his last laugh still etched upon his face.

The essence of war is insanity. Destruction, death, women widowed, children orphaned, lands plundered, property destroyed, lives decimated - it's all bad.