Miles Watson Quotes & Sayings

The course she was on was as fixed and unalterable as the trajectory of a bullet, but you could see she did not believe that. No one in the life ever believed it. They saw a dozen, a hundred, a thousand people precede them into the trap, saw how unvarying and pitiless the end was, and with all that fresh in their minds they did the same, of their own free will. — Miles Watson

In the years that I could not see him, I came to know my father through the medium of photography. My perceptions of him were forged on black-and-white squares that stole an instant out of history and immortalized it between the pages of a family album. When I summoned up the image of the man, it came to me frozen, black-bordered, flat. He stood pale above the creases of his uniform, framed in the foamy wake of some ship, drops of sunlight caught in the buttons on his jacket. He winked at me from the liberty ports of countless exotic places. In an atrocious hand he scrawled stilted, affectionate words to the stranger that bore his name and his features, telling of adventures far away, misbehavings under suns hotter than that which shone over the Greater German Reich. — Miles Watson

I thought fleetingly of Anne, how the faces changed but the act was always the same, the need was always the same, no one drew a line between the sex you bought and the love you made, and your body could not tell the difference. — Miles Watson

New York, I thought, was a city defined by its flaws. In every possible way, its virtues were overwhelmed by its vices, as Jekyll was by Hyde. Yet it was these very vices that gave the city its character - like tar in an oak barrel lending its flavor to Scotch. — Miles Watson

Hell is full of polite men with bone saws. — Miles Watson

It wasn't fair, but maybe Tommy was right on that score. Maybe a man didn't have no right to ask for fair. Maybe a man made fair for himself. — Miles Watson

No one knew much about the Twenty-Eighth Infantry. It was not a glamour outfit.
They knew about the Big Red One and the Screaming Eagles, about the Eighty-Second Airborne and Hell On Wheels, but not about Twenty-Eighth Infantry. The name was met with a certain silence, as if he was in a room full of Harvard graduates and told them his degree was by correspondence. — Miles Watson

The Jews are cowering along the wall, eyes wide, palms up, fingers splayed -- a collective posture of submission. Even now, with everything that has happened, with the city in ruins and the dead as thick upon the streets as busted glass, they don't want to believe we are actually going to kill them. We are Germans, after all; the most civilized people in Europe. And we are soldiers, not murderers. Except for today. Today we are both. — Miles Watson

You have to understand something about girls, Mick. You see 'em in the winner's circle, but you'll never find horseshit on their shoes. — Miles Watson

Kraut was a stand-up guy in the old tradition, in a strange way reminiscent of my father in his steadfast refusal to abandon a position once he had taken it. It was a quality I lacked, and so admired in others when they weren't using it to beat me to the canvas or break my heart. — Miles Watson

He looked like an idol consecrated to the gods of arrogance. Damned if I would bow. — Miles Watson

Fighting is a lot like making love. Timing is everything. — Miles Watson