113 Quotes by Phil Klay

Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't.

You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.

I doubt there's anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism.

The Iraq I returned from was, in my mind, a fairly simple place. By which I mean it had little relationship to reality. It's only with time and the help of smart, empathetic friends willing to pull through many serious conversations that I've been able to learn more about what I witnessed.

I didn't want to write a 'this is how it is' Iraq book, because the Iraq War is an intensely complicated variety of things.

Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a liminal experience forever separating them from civilians. Except... you go there, and it is what it is. A form of human activity as varied as any other.

It's often difficult to get perspective on your own stories, on your own experiences, without talking them through with someone who is genuinely interested in thinking about them. And that's the key.

The civilian wants to respect what the veteran has gone through. The veteran wants to protect memories that are painful and sacred to him from outside judgment.

Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.