67 Quotes by Barbara Nickless

Photographs, like ghosts, are the persistence of memory. Over time, people fade from our recollection, or change. Their faces become kinder or more cruel, their hair less gray or more so. But photographs carry the truth, if only one small piece of it.

Can you let war split a man in two, then turn around and expect the pieces to fit back together? I.

You get to the point where you’re just empty. Empty of feelings and thoughts. Of bone and flesh and blood. Empty of hope and despair. You aren’t dead. But you aren’t living, either.

And I ran hard into a truth I’d known since Iraq. You could throw everything you had at a problem – firepower, manpower, logistical support. You could get a lot of really smart people working on it. You could even get a lot of people to sacrifice their lives for it. And, in the end, might be all you’ve got is the same problem and a higher body count. Forget saving the world. Sometimes you can’t even save one small child.

Nina Simone wafted into the room. Cohen had queued up what I thought of as his deep-thinking playlist and piped it through the built-in sound system. I loved the great women of jazz. Simone, Holiday, Vaughan.

We’ve all been at least a little broken by the world. But the world only notices when we try to hurt it back.

War is a drug; it’ll call you back until it kills you. – Corporal.

Do not call us heroes. Not if you are calling us that in order to absolve yourself of guilt over sending us off to an unwinnable war. Some of us are heroes. But some of us never had the chance. And some of us got slammed face-first into the fact that when we looked inside, we found nothing heroic at all. – Corporal.

We are defined by family before we are defined by anything else; they are our first and primal debt.