113 Quotes by Phil Klay

And that was my homecoming. It was fine, I guess. Getting back feels like your first breath after nearly drowning. Even if it hurts, it's good.

It’s a powerful moment, when you discover a vocabulary exists for something you’d thought incommunicably unique. Personally, I felt it reading Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim.” I have friends who’ve found themselves described in everything from science fiction to detective novels. This self-recognition through others is not simply a by-product of art — it’s the whole point.

I've worked hard to remember it...The problem is I'm not sure what's real memory and what's my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light. Except I'm sure of my bright light.

[The plane's captain] reads off some message about how general orders stay in effect until you reach the States, and you're still considered on duty. So no alcohol.Well, our CO jumped up and said, "That makes about as much sense as a goddamn football bat. All right, Marines, you've got three hours. I hear they serve Guinness." Oo-fucking-rah.

He's nineteen, one of our baby-wipe killers, and all he's killed so far in the Corps has been paper.

I put 1st Fire Team in support. Corporal Moore's team. Moore's a bit of a motard, always thinks his fire team should be main effort, like it's a fucking prize. He could be less oo-rah, but he's good to go.

I put 3rd Fire Team in reserve, as usual. They're Malrosio's, and he's dumber than Fabio on two bottles of NyQuil.

I don't believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose them to extremes of human behavior and unimaginable tests of integrity and courage, and then deposit them back on the home front.

Sin is a lonely thing, a worm wrapped around the soul, shielding it from love, from joy, from communion with fellow men and with God. The sense that I am alone, that none can hear me, none can understand, that no one answers my cries, it is a sickness over which, to borrow from Bernanos, “the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly.” Your job, it seems, would be to find a crack through which some sort of communication can be made, one soul to another.