Karl Marlantes · 257 pages
Rating: (3.9K votes)
“We all have shit on our shoes. We've just got to realize it so we don't track it into the house.”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy the body for its own sake. Look at overweight executives headed for heart attacks on the way to getting their pictures in Fortune or anorexic models suffering slow starvation on their way to getting their pictures in Vogue. Protecting ego is the general case.”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“Cynicism is no more mature than naïveté. You're no more mature, just more burned.”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“Many will argue that there is nothing remotely spiritual in combat. Consider this. Mystical or religious experiences have four common components: constant awareness of one's own inevitable death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other people's lives above one's own, and being part of a larger religious community such as the Sangha, ummah, or church. All four of these exist in combat. The big difference is that the mystic sees heaven and the warrior sees hell. Whether combat is the dark side of the same version, or only something equivalent in intensity, I simply don't know. I do know that at the age of fifteen I had a mystical experience that scared the hell out of me and both it and combat put me into a different relationship with ordinary life and eternity.
Most of us, including me, would prefer to think of a sacred space as some light-filled wonderous place where we can feel good and find a way to shore up our psyches against death. We don't want to think that something as ugly and brutal as combat could be involved in any way with the spiritual. However, would any practicing Christian say that Calvary Hill was not a sacred space?”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“War is society's dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults.”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“Thinking you might be crazy can drive you crazy.”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“Quitting is unthinkable and pain is just weakness leaving the body”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“Once we recognize our shadow's existence we must resist the enticing step of going with its flow.”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“It is not trivial to lie in a report. . . . At the time I wrote it I actually believed what I wrote to be true, fervently. . . . Yet, when I wrote it, I also knew it wasn't true. I call this the lie of two minds.
"I" convinced "myself." The I that did the convincing was the one who needed desperately to justify the entire experience, to make it sane and right and okay and approved. Myself was convinced as the moral self, the part of me I would want to be a judge in a legal system. This moral part of us, however, in these extreme situations, is vulnerable to the overwhelming force of that part of us that needs to justify our actions. . . With this lie I'd lost myself. Perhaps this too adds to the shame.”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“This nation should be less worried about putting the Vietnam syndrome behind us than restarting the World War II victory syndrome that resulted in the Vietnam syndrome in the first place.”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“Today a soldier can go out on patrol and kill someone or have one of his friends killed and call his girlfriend on his cell phone that night and probably talk about anything except what just happened. And if society itself tries to blur it as much as possible, by conscious well-intended efforts to provide “all the comforts of home” and modern transportation and communication, what chance does your average eighteen-year-old have of not becoming confused?2”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“We have an idea of what is right or wrong. And we can debate moral issues as ideas. But moral *standards* are not ideas; they exist in the form of observable measurable behavior. What one sees, hears, and feels every day, by observing how people around one behave, inculcates such standards of behavior.”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“The time for debilitating fear is before and after the mission.”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“When you are confronted with a seemingly painless moral choice, the odds are that you haven’t looked deeply enough.”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy body for its own sake.”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“A Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, came to America more than a century ago and made some astute observations about the American way. He said that we have a misleading idea at the very head of our Constitution: the pursuit of happiness. One can not pursue happiness; if he does he obscures it. If he will proceed with the human task of life, the relocation of the center of gravity of the personality to something greater outside itself, happiness will be the outcome.”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“or the pilots doing nine-to-five jobs at computer consoles in Nevada killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan with drones and commuting to and from their homes like any other commuters. Imagine the psychic split that must ensue from bringing in death and destruction from the sky on a group of terrorists—young men who have mothers and a misplaced idealism that has led them into horrible criminal acts, but nevertheless young and brave men—and then driving home from the base to dinner with the spouse and kids. “Have a nice day at the office, hon?”
― Karl Marlantes, quote from What It is Like to Go to War
“Instead of being wakened to the sound of birdsong, like princesses in books, I was wakened to the sound of Rommel shrieking as Fat Louie beat him senseless for getting into his bowl of Fancy Feast.”
― Meg Cabot, quote from Princess in Pink
“I have the uncanny feeling that, just at the end of my life, I am beginning to reinhabit completely the body I long ago left.”
― Alice Walker, quote from Possessing the Secret of Joy
“Why do we believe one stranger and not another?”
― Todd Strasser, quote from Wish You Were Dead
“How many neighbors ignoring Jolly for her ignorance and bad luck could go down on their knees and save their kid from choking to death this afternoon while the world was going on outside in the sunshine?”
― Virginia Euwer Wolff, quote from Make Lemonade
“Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem - to be yourself! And with the first step you make in this direction you realize that there is neither plus nor minus; you throw the skates away and swim. There is no suffering any more because there is nothing which can threaten your security. And there is no desire to be of help to others even, because why rob them of a privilege which must be earned? Life stretches out from moment to moment in stupendous infinitude. Nothing can be more real than what you suppose it to be. Whatever you think the cosmos to be it is and it could not possibly be anything else as long as you are you and I am I. You live in the fruits of your action and your action is the harvest of your thought. Thought and action are one, because swimming you are in it and of it, and it is everything you desire it to be, no more, no less. Every stroke counts for eternity. The heating and cooling system is one system, and Cancer is separated from Capricorn only by an imaginary line. You don't become ecstatic and you are not plunged into violent grief; you don't pray for rain, neither do you dance a jig. You live like a happy rock in the midst of the ocean: you are fixed while everything about you is in turbulent motion. You are fixed in a reality which permits the thought that nothing is fixed, that even the happiest and mightiest rock will one day be utterly dissolved and fluid as the ocean from which it was born.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Tropic of Capricorn
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