Krzysztof Penderecki Quotes

I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.

My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.

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

When I was in middle school, and teachers lectured about World War II, the conflict seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant. And it had only happened 15 years earlier.

Korea taught me nothing, for no one spoke of it when I was growing up, except as something about how wonderful the girls in Japan were. Vietnam taught some of us more than we perhaps ever wished to know.

I never got away from the war. Not because I was obsessed with it in those years, but because it was the event of my generation and I started out covering it so I stayed with it.

I really think that if I had met Picasso during peacetime, nothing would have happened.

When I was a kid, my dad went to World War II. I didn't know him. I was born in '41.

And having suffered for part of the war when I was a child. I was too young to really understand what was going on but one of my favorite pieces of animation now is that Goodbye Blue Sky in The Wall because that deals directly with that period in time.

Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.

In the 1980s, Vietnam emerged in our culture as a legitimate and compelling topic for discussion rather than something to be hidden in shame.

I was born 20 years after World War II had ended, and people of my generation mostly thought of it as a terrible period portrayed in documentaries you'd seen, flickering, in black and white.

I never saw a movie until I was 10.

I grew up on Queen, ABBA and at the same time, Nityasree.

Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened.

I'd always wanted to write something about the Korean War because of my heritage. My father lost his brother during the war, and I fictionalized that episode, which was told to me very briefly without much detail.

I don’t know who my parents were. I know nothing about my inheritance. I could be Jewish; I could be part Negro; I could be Irish; I could be Russian. I am spiritually a mix anyway, but I did have a solid childhood fortunately, because of some wonderful women who brought me up. I never had a father or a man in the house, and that was a loss...

In one sense, I have always felt glad to have had the war [World War II] in my childhood, because, as a result, nothing that has happened in the world since then has ever seemed quite so bad. On the other hand, I never entirely got over my feeling of being cheated when the promised era of peace in a wonderful "post-war world" failed to materialize. I could not understand how, after all that, people could ever even think of fighting again. And I still can't.

I know all the bad things that happened in that war. I was in uniform four years myself.

My mother's brother was killed while clearing mines in 1945. Those are things that mark your childhood and they help explain why we are so devoted to European unity.

The autobiographer looks at life through the lens of his or her own life and really uses herself or himself as the jumping-off place to examine the social mores and the economic and political climates. In a way, the autobiography becomes history as well as the story of one person, for it becomes the story of a family or the story of the state or nation.

Growing up during World War II certainly affected my whole view of life, but I hardly know how, it goes so deep. What's hard to explain now is that, though we were never invaded, and bombed only once and ineffectively on the coast of Oregon, everybody in the country was in that war. Everything we did was influenced by it - eating, traveling, dressing, thinking - everything in daily life.

I had a nice childhood. War and all the experiences affected me as a person and helped me to grow, to change.

When the war started, religion and superstition (whatever the difference is) permeated the lives of ordinary soldiers, who lived in a thought world not too far removed from the seventeenth century.

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.