76 Quotes by Karl Marlantes

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.

When I first got back from the war, I said, ‘I’m gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.’ So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.

He knew that all of them were shadows: the chanters, the dead, the living. All shadows, moving across this landscape of mountains and valleys, changing the pattern of things as they moved but leaving nothing changed when they left. Only the shadows themselves could change.

Being human was the best he could do. Without man there would be no evil. But there was also no good, nothing moral built over the world of fact. Humans were responsible for it all.