Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

But the participants [in war] never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value.

I'm supposed to be a normal, sane type person, but after you go through war and such, you become superstitious. I am convinced that somebody is looking after me.

The war does not end when you come home. It lives on in memories of your fellow soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who gave their lives. It endures in the wound that is slow to heal, the disability that isn't going away, the dream that wakes you at night, or the stiffening in your spine when a car backfires down the street.

I thought the war would never end. And perhaps it never did, either.

I saw a great many men die afterwards, some suffering horribly, but I do not recall any death that affected me quite so much as that of this first victim in my platoon.

If you are a real soldier, you never get over the war.

War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.

That's the worst of a war--you have to go on hearing about it so long.

A week passes but it feels as if he's never been anywhere else. It's one of the things war does to you. Everything you see works to replace moments and people from your life before, until you can't remember why any of it mattered. It doesn't help if you're a soldier. The effect is the same.

Don't ever go to war. Even if you win, the battle is never over inside you.

My mother just wanted me to forget it. So, of course, every word was immediately, irrevocably branded into my brain.

It's true, we tend to write about the same thing over and over again because this is our trauma. If I had been in World War II, I might have been writing about D-Day over and over again.

We were king’s men, knights, and heroes . . . but some knights are dark and full of terror, my lady. War makes monsters of us all.” “Are you saying you are monsters?” “I am saying we are human. You are not the only one with wounds, Lady Brienne

If all the people who have been hurt by the war were to exclude joy from their lives, it would almost be as if they had died.

At a certain point memory becomes a beach strewn with landmines, all life’s many losses buried in those sands.

No one is now what they were before the war. There’s just no getting any of it back.

If you haven't been in a war and are wondering how long it takes to get used to losing everything you think you need or love, I can tell you the answer is no time at all.

What if I had been born during a war and I lived in an occupied city, and people were being taken out and shot every day? Everything would be different - even after the war ended, my future would be very different. Look at what these poor people in Aleppo are going through. The children, the ones who survive, are going to be absolutely altered by what they live through, and you and I, luckily, have never had to deal with that.

People always remember the worst day of their lifes. It becomes a part of them forever.

The more I've traveled to war zones, the more I'm convinced that the impact and the effects are way beyond anything we can even begin to imagine.

One has personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

More to the point, I know why soldiers, home from war, seldom tell their families about their exploits in more than general terms. We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we've witnessed of man's inhumanity to man, we simply can't go on. perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.

But I don't know what to him about the aftermath of killing a person. About how they never leave you.

I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.