What Moves the Dead

People get hung up on happiness and joy, but fun will take you at least as far and it's generally cheaper to obtain.

Look, if you don't make a fool of yourself over animals, at least in private, you aren't to be trusted.

If we don’t pretend we’re laughing, we might have to admit just how broken we are.

The dead don’t walk. Except, sometimes, when they do.

Sometimes it's hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American.

I am never sure what to think of Americans. Their brashness can be charming, but just when I decide that I rather like them, I meet one that I wish would go back to America, and then perhaps keep going off the far edge, into the sea.

As writers say to each other, “Yes, it’s been done, but you haven’t done it yet.

Headache is always preferable to heartache, and if you’re focusing on not throwing up, you aren’t thinking about how the friends of your youth are dying around you.

If we ran then we would have to admit there was something to run from. If we ran, then the small child that lives in every soldier's heart knew that the monsters could get us.

I am not the solider I was.' 'None of us are what we were.

Ah. American. That explained the clothes and the way he stood with his legs wide and his elbows out, as if he had a great deal more space than was actually available.

I did not know how to deal with this sort of death, the one that comes slow and inevitable and does not let go. I am a solider, I deal in cannonballs and rifle shots. I understand how a wound can fester and kill a soldier, but there is still the initial wound, something that can be avoided with a little skill and a great deal of luck. Death that simply comes and settles is not a thing I had any experience with.

It was fun. People get hung up on happiness and joy, but fun will take you at least as far and it’s generally cheaper to obtain.

The war had been hard on my feet and my knees and my faith in humanity.

I’d been tired of it a decade ago. Now I’d moved to some other state entirely. Transcendent exhaustion, perhaps.

You know how bad news grows in villages. Sneeze at noon and by sundown the gravedigger will be taking your measurements

you’re feeling dreadful, it helps to dress well.

The animal moved. There were three veterans at that table, battle-scarred soldiers who had served their countries honorably in more than one war … and all three of us screamed like small children and recoiled in horror.

You show up to basic training and they hand you a sword and a new set of pronouns.

His voice had that light veneer of humor that we all get, because if we don’t pretend we’re laughing, we might have to admit just how broken we are. It’s like telling stories at the bar about the worst pain you’ve ever been in. You laugh and you brag about it, and it turns the pain into something that will buy you a drink.

And then, of course, there are the other sort. They ask questions, but what they really want to know is what’s in your pants and, by extension, who’s in your bed.

Most of us go to the Devil without him having to personally oversee things.

I took my leave of Miss Potter, pausing to compliment her painting. She turned the compliment aside with a practiced air. “I’m well enough. You should see my niece Beatrix. Twice the talent, and an artist’s eye.

there’s a price you pay for being good at some things.

I had a strong urge to step back from them, and an even stronger urge to poke them with a stick.

It was like sipping a fine vintage wine and knowing that there were complexities that you would never be able to taste, hidden depths that you could not understand.

The Good Lord looks out for fools. In your case, apparently He sends the occasional Englishwoman.

I am delighted by obscure passions, no matter how unusual. During the war, I was once holed up in a shepherd’s cottage, listening for the enemy to come up the hillside, when the shepherd launched into an impassioned diatribe on the finer points of sheep breeding that rivaled any sermon I have ever heard in my life. By the end, I was nodding along and willing to launch a crusade against all weak, overbred flocks, prone to scours and fly-strike, crowding out the honest sheep of the world.

In the course of all that wandering around losing fights, we developed our own language, Gallacian. I am told it is worse than Finnish, which is impressive.

We did not run. If we ran then we would have to admit there was something to run from. If we ran, then the small child that lives in every soldier's heart knew that the monsters could get to us.