Rick Atkinson Quotes

Most of my friends are dead. I watched friends die in my arms at 5, 6, 8. When I grew up, the rest of my friends died of AIDS.

When I decided to write about my brother and friends, I was attempting to answer the question why. Why did they all die like that? Why so many of them? Why so close together? Why were they all so young? Why, especially, in the kinds of places where we are from? Why would they all die back to back to back to back? I feel like I was writing my way towards an answer in the memoir.

I remember burying a girl fourteen years of age who had died with a ruptured appendix... I buried a good many people that I knew, some of whom I loved.

I never had time to think about my beliefs until my 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year, and I took care of her at home until she died in my arms in December of 1992.

Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

Blood and death. That moves me.

The three touchstones that woke Buddha up - sickness, old age, and death - are a pretty good place to start when crafting a tragic tale. And if we need to get more specific: heartbreak, destruction, miscomprehension, natural disasters, betrayal, and the waste of human potential.

Words do not pay for my dead people.

When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.

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.

My biggest fear in life is losing the people I love, and the thing with cancer is that it seems that you can't really control it.

I had to deal with death at a really young age.

My father died beside trees on iron rails... He had 77 dollars on him at the time, and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this, 'You still have to eat.'

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

I watched children dying. That will be the image that will stay with me.

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.

I done been to so many funerals.

There's nothing funny about violence. Death is a real thing.

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

Even if you live to be a ripe old age, you live long enough to see the people you love pass away.

A fundamental and unfortunate part of being alive is to suffer loss and to suffer grief.

Cancer has been a dark thread that has run throughout my life. It's taken my friends, my parents. My beautiful son.

When you are confronted with a level of devastating disease and death, you never lose that sense of unbelievable humility.

After so many deaths I live and write.