Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes

To have your heart in pieces while every other aspect of your life couldn't go better is a traumatic experience. In appearance, life is fine. But as you put your day in focus, everything turns grey. What happened made me realise that complete, absolute happiness doesn't exist.

You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

Most of these who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war.

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

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

When a man is hit by Friendly Fire, his blood pressure lowers and his morale sinks. I have been hit by Friendly Fire in my heart. Sighs spill from my body instead of blood.

But when you kill someone you love, the hard part is never over. It just gets easier to distract yourself from what you've done.

Another of the hard things about being in a war, grandchildren, is that although there are times of quiet when the fighting has stopped, you know you will soon be fighting again. Those quiet times give you the chance to think about what has happened. Some of it you would rather not think about, as you remember the pain and the sorrow. You also have time to worry about what will happen when you go into battle again.

As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.

War. What was it about the prospect of some bloody enterprises that reduced men to the level of animals?

They're fake bullets, so why do I feel like Im bleeding out?

The PoWs went through something so horrible, you don't know who's coming back.

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

War is hell. You can't photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear.

I hated the bangs in the war: I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable.

There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.

War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

War is not a petri dish to examine and analyze our emotions.

Wars are begun by frightened men.

Yes, war is hell. It is awful. It involves human beings killing other human beings, sometimes innocent civilians. That is why we despise war.

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

There are scenes here and effects here that would make George S. Patton wince.

My fears and anxieties throughout my whole life have been slowly squeezing my voice.