Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

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

When you're in the battlefield, survival is all there is. Death is the only great emotion.

For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can't help but love.

I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.

I think we were trying to get off Combat from the moment we were on Combat.

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

The thing that strikes a chord with me... as a mother... is to think of my 17-year-old son fighting would be just terrifying.

War makes early risers of us all.

Since the war nothing is so really frightening not the dark not alone in a room or anything on a road or a dog or a moon but two things, yes, indigestion and high places they are frightening.

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

I think I was unprepared for war.

And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

Dear Mr. President, can I ask you a question, when the bombs fall down will they hurt everyone in my family?

Like some dogs: kick them once and they never trust you again, no matter how nice you are to them.

Then he'd come back home and found out that war didn't cause fear- love did.

Living in war is a co- existence with death.

One war, such as that of our Revolution, is enough for one life.

We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morning. The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born.

War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.

War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death.

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.

Death, whether it regards ourselves or others, appears less terrible in war than at home. The cries of women and children, friends in anguish, a dark room, dim tapers, priests and physicians, are what affect us the most on the death-bed. Behold us already more than half dead and buried.

I remember when I was shot down in that war. I remember how terrified I was. And it made me feel close to my family, and to God, and to life, and I was scared.

And wonder, dread and war have lingered in that land where loss and love in turn have held the upper hand.