71 Quotes by Kevin Powers

Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn’t seem to be much difference in my own writing.

I think a lot of the guys I know and a lot of people I’ve talked to, what they want is very often what most people want, a kind of simple life, a livelihood, a family, people who care about them, people they can care about. I think vets on the whole want the same things that everybody else does.

For one brief incalculable moment we were not brave or afraid.

But things happened the way they happened without regard to our desire for them to have happened another way. Despite an age-old instinct to provide an explanation more complex than that, something with a level of profundity and depth which would seem commensurate with the confusion I felt, it really was that simple.

I’ve been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.

I’m always most interested in writing about things that I don’t understand.

Minutes ticked into the past.

Writing was always an aspiration, but I’d kept it a secret even from myself.

I can’t envision an honest war novel that left war in a positive light.