“When I went into the Army, I made up my mind that I was putting myself at the Army's disposal. I believe in the war. That doesn't mean I believe in the Army. I don't believe in any army. You don't expect justice out of an army, if you're a sensible, grown-up human being, you only expect victory. And if it comes to that, our Army is probably the most just one that ever existed. . . . I expected the Army to be corrupt, inefficient, cruel, wasteful, and it turned out to be all those things, just like all armies, only much less so than I thought before I got into it. It is much less corrupt, for example, than the German Army. Good for us. The victory we win will not be as good as it might be, if it were a different kind of army, but it will be the best kind of victory we can expect in this day and age, and I'm thankful for it.”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“Horror would not annoy a soldier any more than the sight of a hammer annoys a carpenter. It is sentimental to pretend that horror is not the tool of the soldier, just as the hammer is the tool of the carpenter. We live off death and the threat of death and we must take it calmly and use it well.... Eventually I came to enjoy killing, as a pianist enjoys the Czerny which keeps his fingers limber for the Beethoven.”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“It is always necessary to remain barbarians, because it is the barbarians who always win.”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“This time it is not a simple, understandable war, within the same culture. This time it is an assault of the animal world upon the house of the human being. I don’t know what you saw in Africa and Italy, but I know what I saw in Russia and Poland. We made a cemetery a thousand miles long and a thousand miles wide. Men, women, children, Poles, Russians, Jews, it made no difference. It could not be compared to any human action. It could be compared to a weasel in a henhouse. It was as though we felt that if we left anything alive in the East, it would one day bear witness against us and condemn us. And, now, we have made the final mistake. We are losing the war”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“The abuse of alcohol,” Mr. Parrish said in a solemn, preacher-like voice, as he reached for his glass, “is the one thing that puts Man above the animal.”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“The world," said Pavone, "will swing to the left. The whole world except America. The world will swing, not because people read Karl Marx, or because agitators will come out of Russia, but because, after the war is over, that will be the only way they can turn. Everything else will have been tried, everything else will have failed. And I am afraid that American will be isolated, hated, backward, we will all be living there like old maids in a lonely house in the woods, locking the doors, looking under the beds, with a fortune in the mattress, not being able to sleep, because every time the wind blows and a floor creaks, we will think the murderers are breaking in to kill us and take our treasure...”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“It had been off-hand and flattering, in exactly the proper proportions, and Louise had cleverly erected a thin shield of something that was less than and better than love to protect him from the comic, unending abuse of the Army. And, now, it was probably over. Women, Michael thought resentfully, can never learn the art of being transients. They are all permanent settlers at heart, making homes with dull, instinctive persistence in floods and wars, on the edges of invasions, at the moment of the crumbling of states. No, he thought, I will not have it. For my own protection I am going to get through this time alone …”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“You’re a good model for a German soldier, except for the hair. You look as though you once had a thought in your head and that’s hard to find.”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“Are these the people, created in greatness by the work of Jefferson and Franklin, he thought, are these the bitter farmers and hunters and craftsmen who came out of the wilderness, furious for liberty and justice, is this the new world of giants sung by Whitman?”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“He always felt trapped and restless when talking to lawyers or doing any business with them,”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“It was the most banal idea about a war, Michael knew, that if of fatality, but it was impossible not to think of it, impossible not to think of the casual threads of accident on which we survive to face the next if that comes tomorrow.”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“Like most well-brought-up persons of twentieth-century America, the ritual of the private bathroom with the locked door was one of the pillars of existence.”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“The modern world, he thought resentfully, prepares you very poorly for the tests it puts you to.”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“He doesn’t drink.” “Your boss,” said Michael, “is a dangerous alien.”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
“The human race was only bearable when the obscene juices of living were being constantly washed away.”
― Irwin Shaw, quote from The Young Lions
Irwin Shaw
Born place: in South Bronx, New York City, New York, The United States
Born date February 27, 1913
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“For a shy person it’s hard enough to overcome self-consciousness and establish personal relationships with others without having the additional hindrance of a well-meaning but misguided relative who only emphasises that person’s limitations”
― Karl Wiggins, quote from You Really Are Full of Shit, Aren't You?
“When the oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: "let us be different from the evil, namely good! And he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble, and just" -- this, listened to calmly and without previous bias, really amounts to no more than: "we weak ones are, after all, weak; it would be good if we did nothing for which we are not strong enough"; but this dry matter of fact, this prudence of the lowest order which even insects possess (popsing as dead, when in great danger, so as not to do "too much"), has, thanks to counterfeit and self-deception of impotence, clad itself in the ostentatious garb of the virtue of quiet, calm resignation, just as if the weakness of the weak -- that is to say, their essence, their effects, their sole ineluctable, irremovable reality - were a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritous act.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo
“If what you want is the effect of painting, then paint, Aurora. If what you want is truth, learn to use your camera," he would say again and again”
― Isabel Allende, quote from Portrait in Sepia
“Your mother didn't give birth to you," I told hint, "but farted you out of her shrivelled arsehole."
"Frightened or not," Asser said, "you've taken Peredur's silver, so you must fight them now."
"Say one more word, monk," I said, "and I'll cut off your scrawny balls.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from The Pale Horseman
“But “common sense is not faith,” Oswald Chambers had written, “and faith is not common sense.”
― Jan Karon, quote from At Home in Mitford
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