William Saroyan Quotes

The cost of war is constantly spread before me written in many ledgers whose columns are gravestones.

There's nothing but brutality and bravery or cowardice that comes out of war. That's pretty much it.

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.

In war, it feels like everything you're doing is more important because you're in the proximity of violence and death, and that proximity changes your relationship to America because it changes the way you see the world.

As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.

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

It's always the old to lead us to the war It's always the young to fall Now look at all we've won with the sabre and the gun Tell me is it worth it all.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. All you have to do is hold your first dying soldier in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that his life is flowing out and you can’t do anything about it. Then you understand the horror of war.

War is about strategic agendas and epic battles that define nations and shape history. War is about courage and heroism, but it is also about pain and suffering and sorrow and tragedy

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.

At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.

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

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

War taught me that not everything is glamorous.

We have long honored those who gave their lives during the unfortunate reality of war.

I don't think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war.

War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.

The drummer in my first band was killed in Vietnam. He kind of signed up and joined the marines. Bart Hanes was his name. He was one of those guys that was jokin' all the time, always playin' the clown.

History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life.

War is never cheap or easy.

The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.

Some made the ultimate sacrifice. The rest of us were lucky.