“Call listened with amusement--not that the incident hadn't been terrible. Being decapitated was a grisly fate, whether you were a Yankee or not. But then, amusing things happened in battle, as they did in the rest of life. Some of the funniest things he had ever witnessed had occurred during battles. He had always found it more satisfying to laugh on a battlefield than anywhere else, for if you lived to laugh on a battlefield, you could feel you had earned the laugh. But if you just laughed in a saloon, or at a social, the laugh didn't reach deep.”
“This is a damn useless conversation. Goodbye. (Charles Goodnight to Woodrow Call)”
“She didn’t know what to do with the severed leg. She had cut it off, but she didn’t want to touch it or even look at it.”
“Not too many men, in his experience, had achieved a great thing, even one. Very few ever achieved more than one, he knew.”
“Still, he was a salaried man. Even though Katie, who had been a good wife, was dead, he was not his own master.”
“He was just a husband and a salaried man. Choice didn’t play any part in his life.”
“There was no degree of competence that would assure anyone of survival, and no scale that would tell a commander which man would live and which man would die.”
“It seemed to him the highest principle, loyalty. He preferred it to honor. He had never been exactly sure what men meant when they spoke of their honor, though it had been a popular word during the time of the War. He was sure, though, what he meant when he spoke of loyalty. A man didn’t desert his comrades, his troop, his leader. If he did he was, in Call’s book, worthless.”
“A birth usually has more consequences than a death.”
“That God saw him as such gives hope to us all.”
“What is it that demands an answer but never asks a question?”
“Her lips are full and red and tend to wetness and do not ask but rather demand, in a pout of liquid silk, to be kissed. I kiss them often, I admit it, it is what I do, I am a kisser, and a kiss with Lenore is, if I may indulge a bit for a moment here, not so much a kiss as it is a dislocation, a removal and rude transportation of essence from self to lip, so that it is not so much two human bodies coming together and doing the usual things with their lips as it is two sets of lips spawned together and joined in kind from the beginning of post-Scarsdale time, achieving full ontological status only in subsequent union and trailing behind and below them, as they join and become whole, two now utterly superfluous fleshly bodies, drooping outward and downward from the kiss like the tired stems of overblossomed flora, trailing shoes on the ground, husks.”
“Honey, I don't understand that story. What does it mean?"
"It means stick with the dog you know, Auntie Jean", Max told her. "Stick with the dog you know.”
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