Kevin Powers Quotes & Sayings

I wasn't a good student in high school. I wanted to go to college, but they weren't exactly beating down my door to offer me admission, and it's so expensive in the U.S. If you join up for a period, the army will pay your school and provide a stipend. — Kevin Powers

I understand that it's incredibly difficult to watch what's happening on the news every day and not become inured to it. I've fallen victim to that myself, wanting to look away. — Kevin Powers

I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13. — Kevin Powers

Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history. — Kevin Powers

We were not destined to survive. The fact is, we were not destined at all. — Kevin Powers

Clouds spread out over the Atlantic like soiled linens on an unmade bed. — Kevin Powers

I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive. — Kevin Powers

It's not just: you get off the plane, you're back home, everything's fine. Maybe the physical danger ends, but soldiers are still deeply at risk of being injured in a different way. — Kevin Powers

I had feared the truth on her behalf and it had not been my right to make that choice for her. — Kevin Powers

Noises and smells, those can bring back powerful memories. I remember when I was going to school one Fourth of July, and there were a lot of fireworks going off. I knew that I was in Richmond. I knew that I was a college student. But I thought people were shooting at me. — Kevin Powers

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. — Kevin Powers

I'm always most interested in writing about things that I don't understand. — Kevin Powers

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. — Kevin Powers

Towards parties and the banks of streams and ponds, along which young boys would pace out hours in silence after taking the freckled shoulders of those girls into their hands, their hands feeling skin ... and not knowing what to do, those same hands folding as if in prayer, praying without even knowing they are praying God please don't let the world be always slipping from me — Kevin Powers

Body bomb,' he said. All stopped. It was impossible to know who the man was or what brought him to that place, and it was hard to fathom because a moment is never long enough to account for tragedy when you are in it. Grief is a practical mechanism, and we only grieved for those we knew. All others who died in Al Tafar were part of the landscape, as if something had sown seeds in that city that made bodies rise from the earth, in the dirt or up through the pavement like flowers after a frost, dried and withering under a cold, bright sun. — Kevin Powers

People are going to die," he said flatly. "It's statistics." Then he got up and left the room. — Kevin Powers

Writing was always an aspiration, but I'd kept it a secret even from myself. — Kevin Powers

I was disappearing. It was as if I stripped myself away in that darkened
bedroom on a spring afternoon, and when I was finished there would be a pile of
clothes neatly folded and I would be another number for the cable news shows. I
could almost hear it. "Another casualty today," they'd say, "vanished into thin
air after arriving home." Fine. I leaned down and finished unlacing the boot
and strung the dog tag back around my neck and let it lie against the other.
Left boot and left sock off. Pants off. Underwear off. I was gone. — Kevin Powers

I didn't want to be responsible for him. I had enough to worry about. I was disintegrating, too. How was I supposed to keep us both in tact? — Kevin Powers

All choices are illusions, or if they are not illusions their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all the other men and women deciding anything in that moment. — Kevin Powers

His English was exceptional. There was a glottal sound in his voice, but it was not harsh. I'd often asked him to help me with my sparse Arabic, trying to get my pronunciation of this or that word right. "Shukran." "Afwan." "Qumbula." Thank you. You're welcome. Bomb. — Kevin Powers

Her grief was dignified and hidden, as is most grief, which is partly why there is always so much of it to go around. — Kevin Powers

The rest is history, they say. Bullshit, I say. It's imagination or it's nothing, and must be, because what is created in this world can be undone, unmade; the threads of a rope can be unwoven. And if that rope is needed as a guideline for a ferry to a farther shore, then one must invent a way to weave it back, or there will be drownings in the streams that cross our paths. I accept now, though in truth it took some time, that must must be it's own permission. — Kevin Powers

All pain is the same. Only the details are different. — Kevin Powers

We'd had small lives, populated by a longing for something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams. — Kevin Powers

I can't envision an honest war novel that left war in a positive light. — Kevin Powers

Michael Koryta's THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD is an absolutely thrilling read. I read most of it with my breath held, occasionally exhaling to ask myself, 'What will happen next?' I highly recommend it. — 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. — Kevin Powers

Through those drooping branches the city sprawled out haphazardly like a drunk on a sidewalk, fallen where he may. — Kevin Powers

A report had asked us what combat felt like ... It's like a car accident. You know? That instant between knowing that it's gonna happen and actually slamming into the other car. Feels pretty helpless actually, like you've been riding along same as always, then it's there staring you in the face and you don't have the power to do shit about it — Kevin Powers

I've come to accept that parts of life are constant, that just because something happens on two different days doesn't make it a goddamn miracle. — Kevin Powers

Freedom is not the same as lack of accountability. — Kevin Powers

You want to fall, that's all. You think it can't go on like that. It's as if your life is a perch on the edge of a cliff and going forward seems impossible, not for a lack of will, but a lack of space. The possibility of another day stands in defiance of the laws of physics. And you can't go back. So you want to fall, let go, give up, but you can't. And every breath you take reminds you of that fact. So it goes. — Kevin Powers

To understand the world, one's place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning. — Kevin Powers

And what did it mean that this choice was an illusion, that all choices are illusions, or that if they are not illusions, their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choice of all the other men and women deciding in that moment? — Kevin Powers

I didn't want to smile and say thanks. Didn't want to pretend I'd done anything except survive — Kevin Powers

I would only sit muttering with envy for their broad umbrellas, their dryness, and the sweet, unwounded banality of their lives. — Kevin Powers

A new patina whitening the walls with marks of memories, all running together as if the memories themselves aspired to be the walls in which I was imprisoned ... — Kevin Powers

But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed. — Kevin Powers

I smelled the clean house
and the wood-frame bed. It was all filler. The noise, the sound, they existed
just to take up space. My muscles flexed into the emptiness I still called home. — Kevin Powers

I understood. Being from a place where a few facts are enough to define you, where a few habits can fill a life, causes a unique kind of shame. We'd had small lives, populated by a longing from something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams. So we'd come here, where life needed no elaboration and others would tell us who to be. — Kevin Powers

The war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on. — Kevin Powers

You are only as sick as your secrets. — Kevin Powers

The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. — Kevin Powers

The world makes liars of us all. — Kevin Powers

The details of the world in which we live are always secondary to the fact that we must live in them. — Kevin Powers

I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn't mind. The world makes liars of us all. — Kevin Powers

And now I know the extent of Sterling's bravery. It was narrowly focused, but it was pure and unadulterated. I twas a kind of elemental self-sacrifice, free of ideology, free of logic. He would put himself on the gallows in another boy's place for no other reason than that he thought the noose was better suited to his neck. — Kevin Powers

To say what happened, the mere facts, the disposition of events in time, would come to seem like a kind of treachery. The dominoes of moments, lined up symmetrically, then tumbling backward against the hazy and unsure push of cause, showed only that a fall is every object's destiny. It is not enough to say what happened. Everything happened. Everything fell. — Kevin Powers

When we neared the orchard a flock of birds lit from its outer rows. They hadn't been there long. The branches shook with their absent weight and the birds circled above in the riddy mackerel sky, where they made an artless semaphore. I was afraid, I smelled copper and cheap wine. The sun was up, but a half-moon hung low on the opposite horizon, cutting through the morning sky like a figure from a child's pull-tab book.
We were lined along the ditch up to our ankles in a soupy muck. It all seemed in that moment to be the conclusion of a poorly designed experiment in inevitability. Everything was in its proper place, waiting for a pause in time, for the source of all momentum to be stilled, so that what remained would be nothing more than detritus to be tallied up. The world was paper-thin as far as I could tell. And the world was the orchard, and the orchard was what came next. But none of that was true. I was only afraid of dying. — Kevin Powers

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable. — Kevin Powers

The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren't any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood. — Kevin Powers

I feel like I'm being eaten from the inside out and I can't tell anyone what's going on ... — Kevin Powers

And I understood why he came and why I couldn't go, not just then at least, because one never knows if what one sees will disappear forever. — Kevin Powers

I wanted to go to sleep and stay there, that's all. A passive wish, one I didn't push. Sure, there is a fine line between not wanting to wake up and actually wanting to kill yourself, and while I discovered you can walk that line for a long while without even noticing, anybody who is around you surely will ... — Kevin Powers

One of the things my service in Iraq did give me was this freedom from fear of failure or any kind of expectations that I had to take a standard path. — Kevin Powers

I'm not even sure he would have realized he was permitted to have his own desires and preferences. That it would have been okay for him to have a favorite place, to walk with satisfaction down the long straight boulevards of whatever post he may have gone to next, to admire the uniformity of the grass, green and neatly shorn beneath a blue, limitless sky, to bury himself in a sandy shallow of some clear cold stream and let the water wash over the pitted skin of his scarred body. I don't know what his favorite place would have been like, because I don't believe he would have let himself have one. He would have waited for one to be assigned to him. That's the way he was ... Everything he'd done had been a response to a preexisting expectation. — Kevin Powers

There was no center to the world. The curves of all our bells are cracked. — Kevin Powers

It's lovely to think that snow can be special. we're always told it is. Of all those million million flakes that fall, no two are alike, forever and ever, amen. I've spent some time looking out the window of my cabin watching snowflakes fall like a shot dove's feathers fluttering slowly down to the ground. They all look the same to me. — Kevin Powers

I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so. — Kevin Powers

What it had indexed to was only an idea of a place, an abstraction formed from memories too brief and passing to account for the small effects of time: wind scouring and lifting the dust of the plains of Nineveh in immeasurable increments, the tuck of a river farther into its bend, hour by hour, year by year; the map would become less and less a picture of fact and more a poor translation of memory in two dimensions. It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn't much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow. — Kevin Powers

My personal opinion is that if someone writes honestly about war, it will inherently be anti-war. — Kevin Powers

There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told and what is true. — Kevin Powers

Minutes ticked into the past. — Kevin Powers

Joining the military is not to be taken lightly. You're putting every part of yourself at risk, not just your body but your moral and spiritual centre. — Kevin Powers

As human beings, we have the blessing and the curse that we're able to adapt to almost anything. No matter how extreme the circumstances you're in, they become normal. — Kevin Powers

I wanted something that I could look back on and say, yes, you were fighting too, you burned to be alive, and whatever failure or accident of nature caused you to be killed could be explained by something other than the fact that I'd missed your giving up. — Kevin Powers