Rorke Denver · 304 pages
Rating: (2.2K votes)
“Read. You can always talk with another reader.”
― Rorke Denver, quote from Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior
“What we teach is pure SEAL. The lessons are simple, clear, and well-defined: They come right out of our basic values. Winning pays. Losing has consequences. Nothing substitutes for preparation. Life isn’t fair and neither is the battlefield. Even the smallest detail matters. We are a brotherhood. Our success depends on our team performance. And we will not fail.”
― Rorke Denver, quote from Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior
“We gotta haul ass so that clown doesn’t catch us,” Trey said. “What?” “That clown on the bicycle. He’s gaining on us. I don’t want that sucker to catch us.” Four days into Hell Week, and Trey truly believed that a clown on a bicycle on the Bay of San Diego was going to catch us in our IBS. He couldn’t let that happen.”
― Rorke Denver, quote from Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior
“I like working the day shift,” I told Ro and Rolex as they put their sniper rifles down and we climbed off the roof. “Any shift,” Ro said. It didn’t take long for word to spread across Anbar. A new group of predators were in town now, and they were working around the clock.”
― Rorke Denver, quote from Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior
“In summer months, the concrete gets so blisteringly hot, instructors have to hose it down so the recruits won’t singe their hands doing push-ups. The Grinder is where SEAL graduations are held and where, like a constant taunt, the SEAL exit bell hangs. A famous sign is also there: THE ONLY EASY DAY WAS YESTERDAY.”
― Rorke Denver, quote from Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior
“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time. —LEO TOLSTOY”
― Rorke Denver, quote from Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior
“You’re going to see him quit and some of you are going to say, ‘If he can’t make it, I can’t make it.’ Don’t praise false idols. I promise you—one has nothing to do with the other.”
― Rorke Denver, quote from Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior
“Whatever might happen, I always knew my brother had my back.”
― Rorke Denver, quote from Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior
“It was like learning life lessons from your big brother or your crazy uncle. How to handle yourself in a bar fight: “Hit first. Hit hard. And be ready to move.” How to behave around women: “Date strippers. Don’t marry strippers.” Some of the advice was sage.”
― Rorke Denver, quote from Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior
“But in the mouth of Mother Nature's fury, Ethan's totally at ease, and I wonder if it's because he's studied weather for years, or because he figured out a long time ago that the things that really hurt you don't usually fall from the sky.”
― Lara Zielin, quote from The Waiting Sky
“Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content. —Paul Valéry”
― Kate Carlisle, quote from Homicide in Hardcover
“Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from Hitch-22: A Memoir
“Golden hands. It is said that all Poles have them, and that this is how you know your place in life, by the ease of your hands, that whether you are born to make cakes or butcher animals, cuddle children or paint pictures, drive nails or play jazz, your hands know it before you do. Long before birth, the movements are choreographed into the tendons as they're formed.”
― Brigid Pasulka, quote from A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True
“We are human in expression but divine in creation and limitless in potentiality.”
― quote from Discover the Power Within You
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