Philip Pullman Quotes

And the blood of brave men was shed like unto the shedding of rain from a black cloud.

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.

As one who participated in all the wars of the state of Israel, I saw the horror of wars. I saw the fear of wars. I saw my best friends being killed in battles. I was seriously injured twice.

I have seen heroics - soldiers saving other soldiers' lives - and horrors.

Sacrifice is going to war for your country. Sacrifice is a brave young man being blown up by a landmine in Afghanistan.

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

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

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.

For the most part, everybody who fights in war fights to survive.

I have always done my duty. I am ready to die. My only regret is for the friends I leave behind me.

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.

War is about dead people.

I gave my life for freedom--This I know; For those who bade me fight had told me so.

There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.

Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.

War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

In peace sons bury fathers, but war violates the order of nature, and fathers bury sons.

There's nothing glorious about war. There's nothing glorious about holding your friends in your arms and watching them die. There's nothing glorious about having to leave your home for 6 to 8 months while your family's back here and you're away.

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

They died hard, those savage men - like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stunk. And I loved them.

I went across the fields to avoid the straight highways, along the firing lines where people were shooting at a small wooded hill, which is now covered with wooden crosses and lines of graves instead of spring flowers.

A ball had passed between my body and the right arm which supported him, cutting through the sleeve and passing through his chest from shoulder to shoulder. There was no more to be done for him and I left him to his rest. I have never mended that hole in my sleeve.

In the end, my story, in Iraq and afterward, is about more than just killing people or even fighting for my country. It's about being a man. And it's about love as well as hate.

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

Blood and death. That moves me.