George Saunders Quotes

Nations with nations mix'd confus'dly die, and lost in one promiscuous carnage lie.

War is hell. Hollywood fantasizes about it and makes it look good... war sucks.

The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the childlike cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence. Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we are still alive.

There is chaos. There's bloodshed. There's carnage.

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

I couldn't stand the idea of bloodshed, casualties.

War means fighting, and fighting means killing.

There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

War can be fun for certain people. It's a magnet for sadists, losers, and angry dreamers.

For what can war, but endless war, still breed?

My mind revolts and my soul cannot support the weight of so much evil: theft, rape, pillage, deaths, and murders, fires and devastation; the virgin violated, the cry of the widow and the orphan; the father armed against his son and each one looking for his brother to kill him; of those who have migrated; of the thousands who have fled; of the bodies stretched out in the public streets; of the bones which cover the fields and of so much blood shed on Venezuela’s soil.

History is a bath of blood.

War is death’s holy-day.

And this I hate—not men, nor flag nor race, But only War with its wild, grinning face.

Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives--when the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and grey fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forget all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands.

Am I awake or dreaming? It doesn’t matter anymore. When I close my eyes I dream of death and war. When I open my eyes I see death and war.

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind. Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky And the affrighted steed ran on alone, Do not weep. War is kind. Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment, Little souls who thirst for fight, These men were born to drill and die. The unexplained glory flies above them, Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom -A field where a thousand corpses lie. Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.

Cursing themselves in ragged dreamsfire has singed the edges of,they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.Shimmering fans work against the heat& smell of gunpowder, making moneyfloat from hand to hand. The next momenta rocket pushes a white fistthrough night sky, & they scatter like birds& fall into the shape their liveshave become.

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.

Cry "havoc!" and let loose the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial.

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war.

War is death's feast.

War is murder writ large.