Thom Gunn Quotes

I always write about war, love, death, and injustice. There's plenty of that around, so I never run out of ideas.

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.

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

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.

It is not easy to talk about peace to people who are mourning every day.

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.

The disasters of war can be infinitely eerie and poignant.

9/11, the wars and terrorism have affected all of us in different ways: people who lost family on 9/11, the people who lost family in the wars and people who lost family in various terrorist attacks that have occurred since.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

You rarely hear women crying in Grozney. They have cried their eyes out long ago.

War violates the order of nature and causes parents to bury their children.

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

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

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.

There's something about being amid the chaos and the horror of a war that makes you appreciate all you don't have - and all you may lose forever.

As a combat veteran, I know the cost of war.

I know that war is very cruel and that life is harder when you aren't able to live in the place you called home.

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.

Words do not pay for my dead people.

So war is an extremely sad business, because the majority of people don't want to be in it.

It is the youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow... that are the aftermath of war.

The War will leave none of us as it found us.