Paul Auster Quotes

This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.

War is not a computer-generated missile striking a digital map. War is the color of earth as it explodes in our faces, the sound of child pleading, the smell of smoke and fear. Women survivors of war are not the single image portrayed on the television screen, but the glue that holds families and countries together. Perhaps by understanding women, and the other side of war ... we will have more humility in our discussions of wars... perhaps it is time to listen to womens side of history.

Wars shatter so many lives. I think especially of children robbed of their childhood.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

War destroys people's souls. Most people focus on physical injuries, but the invisible injuries can take a lifetime to heal and affects the lives of generations to come.

So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it.

World War II was a trauma that paralysed writers. It was something metaphysical, diabolical.

No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appall you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.

That's the worst of a war--you have to go on hearing about it so long.

I was a bombadier in WW 2. When you are up 30,000 feet you do not hear the screams or smell the blood or see those without limbs or eyes. It was not til I read Hersey's Hiroshima that I realized what bomber pilots do.

Every man has a right over his own life and war destroys lives that were full of promise; it forces the individual into situations that shame his manhood, obliging him to murder fellow men, against his will.

Don't ever go to war. Even if you win, the battle is never over inside you.

Unfortunately, violence begets violence. And this is how the war on terrorism seems to be going at this juncture. A lot of people are losing their lives. Many children are losing their parents. Too many houses are being destroyed. And, unfortunately, the arms industry seems to flourish.

Whenever you have war, you often have more deaths because the medical system and the food system breaks down, than you have directly through violence.

Our modern wars make many unhappy while they last and none happy when they are over.

Sweet Jesus, war does terrible things to people.

Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.

I really do think that if for one week in the United States we saw the true face of war, we saw people's limbs sheared off, we saw kids blown apart, for one week, war would be eradicated. Instead, what we see in the U.S. media is the video war game.

The evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come.

The more I've traveled to war zones, the more I'm convinced that the impact and the effects are way beyond anything we can even begin to imagine.

When you talk about the mental health problems, when people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over and you're strong and you can handle it. But a lot of people can't handle it. And they see horror stories. They see events that you couldn't see in a movie, nobody would believe it.

When a war is over I think it's a cowardly thing to leave the war behind you in minefields that hit women and children and the most vulnerable. Imagine the war is finished and you go to work and there are snipers shooting at you. Imagine taking your kids to the beach and you find that the beach is blowing up beneath you. Like there's nowhere safe.

War hurts. It hurts no matter which sides the bombs are falling on.

War will of itself discover and lay open the hidden and rankling wounds of the victorious party.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.