76 Quotes by Karl Marlantes

"Matterhorn is my metaphor of the Vietnam War – we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again."

"His killing that day would not have been evil if the dead soldiers hadn’t been loved by mothers, sisters, friends, wives. Mellas understood that in destroying the fabric that linked those people, he had participated in evil, but this evil had hurt him as well. He also understood that his participation in evil, was a result of being human."

"Once we recognize our shadow’s existence we must resist the enticing step of going with its flow."

"I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That’s my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me."

"War is society’s dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults."

"The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn’t teach me how to deal with killing."

"I mean, if you’re proud of what you’ve done when you’ve served in the military, well then we call that bragging. And if you are unhappy about what happened, we call that complaining. And so what are you going to do?"

"Vietnam was the first time that Americans of different races had to depend on each other. In the Second World War, they were segregated; it was in Vietnam that American integration happened in the military – and it wasn’t easy."

"Hawke had learned long ago that what really mattered in combat was what people were like when they were exhausted."

"I began writing ‘Matterhorn’ in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript."