76 Quotes by Karl Marlantes

Victory in combat is like sex with a prostitute. For a moment you forget everything in the sudden physical rush, but then you have to pay your money to the woman showing you the door. You see the dirt on the walls and your sorry image in the mirror.

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.

Quitting is unthinkable and pain is just weakness leaving the body.

It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn’t know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about.

When the peace treaty is signed, the war isn’t over for the veterans, or the family. It’s just starting.

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.