Nicholson Baker Quotes

I'm just so grateful for the 10 years that I had in Sri Lanka when it was in the middle of a war and I was getting shot at, because now and again I remember glimpses of those times, and I just go, 'Wow, I'll never, ever see that again in my life. And I'm never gonna feel that, and I'm never gonna feel for a human being like that.'

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.

I know what war's like. I know what scene's like.

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

And when Roger talks about the frightened ones running away from the bombs, I immediately thought of my days when I was young and I had to wear these gas masks.

I think the brutality is important to convey as part of the story, to see how brutal it is to have these kids in battle with one another.

I woke up and all I could see was Iraqis standing all around me, looking down upon me. I knew at that moment something terrible had happened and I wasn't in the right place.

It's a war zone. Terrible things happen.

There's no such thing as a crowded battlefield. Battlefields are lonely places.

Doesn't it strike you as queer that I, who couldn't cut the head off a chicken, and who was sick at the sight of blood, should be cast into the middle of a great war, with blood flowing all about me.

I've never been to war, and I would never presume to fully understand the horrors that that kind of experience can impart.

When I went to Kabul - weeks after I finished 'The Kite Runner' - I met a lot of people from all walks of life: men, women, children, people from ministries, hotel doormen, shopkeepers. And I learned from them what daily life was like when the rockets were flying overhead.

In war, everything changes. You are very selective of what you do because everything you do can be the last thing you do in your life.

I was forced to be political because I had bombs falling on me as a child in Tehran.

War is a business in which a lot of people watch a few people get killed and are damn glad it wasn't them.

This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.

War makes early risers of us all.

The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.

He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear. ~Jose Aracadio Segundo Buendia After the second banana slaughter

Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.

War always takes you by surprise.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

I've been in Iraq, and it never occurred to me to go, 'Hey, this war is bogus,' to some guy who's 24 hours a day trying not to get shot at or blown up.

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

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