“He is a true casualty of battle. There's not a physical scar, but look at the man's heart, and his head, and there are scars galore.”
― David Finkel, quote from The Good Soldiers
“It's a thin line between what we're calling acceptable and not acceptable. As a leader, you're supposed to know when not to cross it. But how do you know? Does the army teach us how to control our emotions? Does the army teach us how to deal with a friend bleeding out in front of you? No.”
― David Finkel, quote from The Good Soldiers
“I can see the little girl, the face of the little girl. And as much as people say that they don't care about these people and all that, I don't care about these people - but I do, at the same time, if that makes any sense. They don't want to help themselves, they're blowing us up, yeah, that hurts, but it also hurts to know that I've seen a girl that's as old as my little brother watch me shoot somebody in the head. And I don't care if she's Iraqi, Korean, African, white - she's still a little girl. And she watched me shoot somebody.”
― David Finkel, quote from The Good Soldiers
“The thought that the bullet has already been fired at each of us and it is only a matter of time when it will hit, brings comfort to some and terror to others.”
― David Finkel, quote from The Good Soldiers
“To hear them laugh was to hear that everything was all right, but to see them laugh was to see otherwise”
― David Finkel, quote from The Good Soldiers
“We got some stupid fuckers,” Kauzlarich said after the inflatable doll had been tossed into a burn barrel and set on fire, which created a thick column of oily black smoke that rose over the center of the FOB. “We got what we got,” Cummings said—and what he and Kauzlarich were wondering was whether these first cracks were just the effects of war, or also the effects of an army forced to take more and more stupid fuckers. It was something they had been dealing with since they began forming the battalion. For several years, in order to meet recruiting goals, the army had been accepting an ever-increasing number of recruits who needed some kind of waiver in order to become soldiers. Without the waivers, those recruits would not have been allowed into the army. Some of the waivers were for medical problems and others were for low scores on aptitude tests, but the greatest percentage were for criminal offenses ranging from misdemeanor drug use to felonies such as burglary, theft, aggravated assault, and even a few cases of involuntary manslaughter. In 2006, the year the 2-16 was getting most of its soldiers, 15 percent of the army’s recruits were given criminal waivers. Most were for misdemeanors, but nearly a thousand were for some type of felony conviction, which was more than double the number granted just three years before. This”
― David Finkel, quote from The Good Soldiers
“I start thinking about what happened and then I start thinking about why I'm still here. It's pointless. They say on TV that the soldiers want to be there? I can't speak for every soldier, but I think if people went around and made a list of names of who fucking thinks we should actually be here and who wants to be here, ain't nobody that wants to be here, because there's no point. What are we getting out of fucking being here? Nothing.”
― David Finkel, quote from The Good Soldiers
“It wasn't as if they had a choice. They were soldiers whose choices had ended when they had signed contracts and taken their oaths. Whether they had joined for reasons of patriotism, of romantic notions, to escape a broken home of some sort, or out of economic need, their job now was to follow the orders of other soldiers who were following orders, too. Somewhere, far from Iraq, was where the orders began, but by the time they reached Rustamiyah, the only choice left for a solider was to choose which lucky charm to tuck behind his body armor, or which foot to line up in front of the other, as he went out to follow the order of the day.”
― David Finkel, quote from The Good Soldiers
“He knew America, and even though he hadn't been there in fifteen years, he knew what its soldiers liked because of what one of them had written on the door of a metal locker that was in the room he'd been given to live in. "Sex, potato soup, and Johnny Cash," it said.”
― David Finkel, quote from The Good Soldiers
David Finkel
Born place: in The United States
Born date October 28, 1955
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“You want this so badly—this second chance, this chance at real redemption—that you can’t see the truth.” “What”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Six Years
“Margery," I blurted out in a passion of frustration. "I don't know what to make of you!"
Nor I you, Mary. Frankly, I cannot begin to comprehend the motives of a person who dedicates a large portion of her life to the contemplation of a God in whom she only marginally believes."
I felt stunned, as if she had struck me in the diaphragm. She looked down at me, trying to measure the effect of her words.
Mary, you believe in the power that the idea of God has on the human mind. You believe in the way human beings talk about the unknowable, reach for the unattainable, pattern their imperfect lives and offer their paltry best up to the beingless being that created the universe and powers its continuation. What you balk as it believing the evidence of your eyes, that God can reach out and touch a single human life in a concrete way." She smiled a sad, sad smile. "You mustn't be so cold, Mary. If you are, all you will see is a cold God, cold friends, cold love. God is not cold-never cold. God sears with heat, not ice, the heat of a thousand suns, heat that inflames but does not consume. You need warmth, Mary-you, Mary, need it. You fear it, you flirt with it, you imagine that you can stand in its rays and retain your cold intellectual attitude towards it. You imagine that you can love with your brain. Mary, oh my dear Mary, you sit in the hall and listen to me like some wild beast staring at a campfire, unable to leave, fearful of losing your freedom if you come any closer. It won't consume you; I won't capture you. Love does not do either. It only brings life. Please, Mary, don't let yourself be tied up by the bonds of cold academia."
Her words, the power of her conviction, broke over me like a great wave, inundating me, robbing me of breath, and, as they receded in the room, they pulled hard at me to folllow. I struggled to keep my footing against the wash of Margery's vision, and only when it began to lose its strength, dissipated against the silence in the room, was I seized by a sudden terror at the nearness of my escape.”
― Laurie R. King, quote from A Monstrous Regiment of Women
“This phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole has a name. It's called closure.
In our daily lives, we often commit closure, mentally completing that which is incomplete based on past experience.”
― Scott McCloud, quote from Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
“Yes, and Eliza and I composed a precocious critique of the Constitution of the United Staes of America, too. We argued that it was a good scheme for misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves-- and yet it described no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!
“Everybody knew that being dead could put you in a terrible mood.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, quote from The Hummingbird's Daughter
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