“He said that it was not his job to ensure that his soldiers died for their country. It was his job to make sure the other poor bastards died for theirs. Understand?”
“America can take many things, but she cannot take massive casualties. Saddam can. They don’t matter to him.”
“Kuwait was always historically part of Iraq. Like Nehru invading Portuguese Goa.”
“But the up-front reason is that he was reclaiming rightful Iraqi territory. Look, it happens all over the world. India took Goa, China took Tibet, Indonesia has taken East Timor. Argentina tried for the Falklands. Each time, the claim is retaking a chunk of rightful territory. It’s very popular with the home crowd, you know.”
“The notion that the lobby at Langley is choked with the corpses of former agents gunned down by their own colleagues at the behest of genocidal directors on the top floor is amusing but wholly unreal.”
“If that was it, I thought, it was a whole new way of looking at things, a whole new way of looking at life. I’d always done whatever I figured I ought to do. That was the kind of person I was. I just did what I thought was best. Maybe that wasn’t how it was supposed to be after you’d opened up your heart to God. Maybe you were supposed to ask somebody else, and who else would that be but God?”
“There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth.”
“It is widely rumored, and also true, that I wrote my first novel in a closet.”
“Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool."
"True," said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerschaum, "although I have been guilty of certain doggerel myself.”
“I do not need a scabbard to sheathe my mind.”
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