Barracks Quotes & Sayings

A brusque whisper coaxed Phillip from slumber. Someone had called his name. The cot squeaked as he sat up and squinted at a featureless silhouette. "Who is it?"
"Rise. Quick. Bring your medicine maker." The ragged voice belonged to True Seeker.
Tasked with keeping a watchful eye on Milly, the young man would come to Phillip at this hour for only one reason. He swung his legs to the ground. With one foot going into his trousers, he took a wide step across the narrow barracks and jostled Buck's shoulder.
His friend was on his feet and half-dressed before Phillip left the building, alarm urging his feet to a gallop. No one need tell him which direction to go. He buckled his sword belt as he went. The scabbard slapped his leg with each footfall, bringing to mind a similar night not long enough ago. His stride lengthened.
This time, he would run Collins clean through. — April W. Gardner

The things you see in Army barracks sometimes defies logic. After a while, you give up trying to rationalize and understand such things ... you just accept them as your new reality. — Scott Burkett

The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers ... — Recep Tayyip Erdogan

I don't think my father loved his job with the city, but on the other hand, I'm not sure he ever asked himself major questions like 'Do I like my job? Is this really what I want to spend my life doing? Is it as fulfilling as some of the dreams I had for myself when I was a young man serving in Korea and reading British poetry in my bunk in the barracks at night?' He had a family to support, this was his job, he got up every day and did it, end of story, everything else is just self-indulgent nonsense. That may actually have been the lifetime sum-total of his thinking on the matter. He — David Foster Wallace

Life is not an on and off switch. You don't have to have a military that is either in hard combat or is in the barracks. — James G. Stavridis

To think about and prepare for war is boring, boring for everyone. It's being locked in barracks. — Natalie Clifford Barney

When the first women started work in the barracks on 25 August 1942, Siemens & Halske joined three other major German manufacturers- IG Farbe at Auschwitz, Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG at Mauthausen and Heinkel at Sachsenhausen-in using concertation-camp slave labour. So pleased was the company with its new Ravensbruck factory that Rudolf Dingel...wrote to the Reichsfuhrer SS thanking him warmly. Himmler's kindness towards Siemens inspired him with 'particular joy. — Sarah Helm

Lanka's heart lay large barracks. — B.S. Murthy

He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy ... who had left upon every field of victory in Europe drops of that same blood which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown grey before his time in discipline and in command, who had lived with his sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade blackened by powder, his forehead wrinkled by the cap, in the barracks, in the camp, in the bivouac, in the ambulance, and who after twenty years had returned from the great wars with his cheek scarred, his face smiling, simple, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done everything for France and nothing against her. — Victor Hugo

[The Church] has lived through its early travails and has now come to accept an easier way of life. It is content to carry on its painless program with enough money to pay its bills and a membership large enough to assure its future. Its members now look to it for security rather than for guidance in the battle between good and evil. It has become a school instead of a barracks. Its members are students, not soldiers. They study the experiences of others instead of seeking new experiences of their own. — A.W. Tozer

The courtroom is one instance of the fact that while our society may be liberal and democratic in some large and vague sense, its moving parts, its smaller chambers
its classrooms, its workplaces, its corporate boardrooms, its jails, its military barracks
are flagrantly undemocratic, dominated by one commanding person or a tiny elite of power. — Howard Zinn

You're right,' said the corporal. 'It serves editors like that right. They only stir the people up. Last year when I was still only a lance-corporal I had an editor under me and he called me nothing else but a disaster for the army, but when I taught him unarmed drill and he sweated, he always used to say: "Please respect the human being in me." But I gave him hell for his human being when the order was "flat down" and there were a lot of puddles in the barracks courtyard.
...
As I said, he was always on about his "human being" and nothing else. Once when he was reflecting over a puddle in which he had to plop down when he did his "flat down" I said to him: "When you're always talking about a human being even when you're in the mud remember that man was created out of the dust of the ground and it must have been O.K. for him. — Jaroslav Hasek

Irrespective of nationality, soldiers are always open to the same discomfort and to the same comradeship the world over. I'll make things easy for you if you make things easy for me. That is, after all the unwritten law of the barracks. — Peter Ustinov

His cause in the mid-1980s was solving the systemic problems in DOD that he believed to be responsible for the catastrophic handling of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983. The hearings he called for, and parallel ones in the House, revealed a riot of military disorganization that rivaled that of the Crimean War: an unclear chain of command; almost nonexistent communications between the military services; vague rules of engagement; and poor coordination, even in the timely evacuation of the wounded. Goldwater and Nichols, both veterans with a deep understanding of the military, took the lead on investigating these debacles. — Anonymous

And so Betsie and I arrived in Barracks 8 in the small hours of that morning, bringing not only the Bible, but a new knowledge of the power of Him whose story it was. — Corrie Ten Boom

But the same thing was true in the army. You slept in a barracks with all kinds of people of every nationality, every trade, every character and quality you can imagine, and that was a good experience. — Shelby Foote

That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Depot, the barracks, the camps, History, time-everything that defiles and destroys you-have been able to take away from her. — Patrick Modiano

A barracks is meant to be a place where real soldiers were to be fed and equipped for war, not a place to settle down in or as a comfortable snuggery in which to enjoy ourselves. I hope that if ever they, our soldiers, do settle down God will burn their barracks over their heads! — Catherine Booth

You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea: you can not put an idea up against a barracks-square wall and riddle it with bullets: you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build. — Sean O'Casey

Pigs after pigs, walking in group going on the way for the barracks, to be the first meal of the wolfs.
(Salem's Lot) — Deyth Banger

temples it contained have been converted into barracks, arsenals — William Eleroy Curtis

Listen, Stephen King used to write in the washroom of his trailer after his kids went to sleep. Harlan Ellison wrote in the stall of a bathroom of his barracks during boot camp. Elmore Leonard got up at 5 AM every morning to write before work.
Every time my alarm goes off at 5 AM and I don't want to get up, or I would rather sit down after work and play a videogame, I think about those guys. Take care of your family. They need you and love you. Make time for them. Then stop screwing around and finish your damn book. — Bernard Schaffer

Well, Alexander thought, any minute now, one of the girls he had carelessly discarded was going to come by the barracks with a gun and blow his brains out and on his tombstone the epitaph would read, Here lies Alexander, who couldn't remember the name of any girl he had fucked. — Paullina Simons

8:30 P.M.: Personal time. Free of Reznik at last. We wash our jumpsuits, shine our boots, scrub the barracks floor and the latrine, clean our rifles, pass around dirty magazines, and swap other contraband like candy and chewing gum. We play cards and bust each other's nuts and complain about Reznik. We share the day's rumors and tell bad jokes and push back against the silence inside our own heads, the place where the never-ending voiceless scream rises like the superheated air above a lava flow. Inevitably — Rick Yancey

Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence. — William Faulkner

The camp offices stood in the centre, adjoining the shrine to Jupiter that held the legion's Eagle. In the camps of the Vth Macedonica and the VIth Ferrata, these buildings were of grey stone, dressed by Gaulish masons to such smoothness that a man could run his hand down them and not feel the joins.
The legions' respective signs of the bull and the eagle had been carved thereon with such pride and perfection that men copied them on their shields and carved them on the bedheads in the barracks.
At Raphana, the camp office of the XIIth Fulminata and IVth Scythians before which we dismounted was built of the local baked mud, and some drunkard with a poor eye for detail had etched
the Scythians' sign of the goat and the Fulminata's crossed thunderbolts together, so that it seemed as if the goat were thunderstruck, or else that lightning grew from its anus. Both applied equally; each was unthinkable in a legion which had any pride in itself. — M.C. Scott

Seven days from the time they pulled into Dawson, they dropped down the steep bank by the Barracks to the Yukon Trail, and pulled for Dyea and Salt Water. Perrault was carrying despatches if anything more urgent than those he had brought in; also, the travel pride had gripped him, and he purposed to make the record trip of the year. Several things favored him in this. The week's rest had recuperated the dogs and put them in thorough trim. The trail they had broken into the country was packed hard by later journeyers. And further, the police had arranged in two or three places deposits of grub for dog and man, and he was travelling light. — Jack London

So the cold barracks were spared, lonely as they were, and the armories were unscathed, empty as they were, and the larders went unmolested, depleted as they were, and only the common people burned. — Mike S. Elton

The tweezers weren't where they were supposed to be. He dug in the bottom of the kit until he found them, cursed the men on other shifts with no respect for their colleagues. It was like living in a dorm, Darcy thought. No, not the right word, the right memory. Like living in a barracks. It was the semblance of order over an underlying mess. Crisp sheets with folded corners over stained mattresses. That's what this was, people not putting things back where they belonged. — Hugh Howey

Five M4s plus a SAW would be a normal load-out for a standard six-man fire team. But for this job, it was way too light. If I'd had my way, every man on the squad would have been carrying a machine gun. Lacking that, I wanted at least one more heavy weapon. And at the moment, the only other guy in the barracks who had a SAW was Gregory, who was sitting near the west door. "Hey, Greg, we need an assault gunner," said Raz, who'd read my thoughts. "You up for this?" "Honestly? No," replied Gregory, who seemed to be in a state of shock from the ordeals he had already endured. "I don't know if I can do it." Then Jones stepped over to Gregory. — Clinton Romesha

Predictions that unit cohesion could not survive honesty about sexual orientation were simply wrong. What does threaten morale arethe prolonged investigations, the questioning of friends and co-workers, the searches of barracks for magazines and letters, the witch hunts. — Anna Quindlen

But Clara's father believed that nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds. He had a good understanding of history and knew that the future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

And on a Canadian set, everybody is equal. You get paid the same. You live together in barracks. You have a communal kitchen. You buy and cook your own food. — Sandra Oh

Listen, dis foreign TV channels dey spoil de image of our country. Dese white stations dey make billions of dollars to sell your war and blood to de world ... We no bad like dis. OK, why dem no dey show corpses of deir white people during crisis for TV? Abi, people no dey kill for America or Europe?"
"You dey speak grammar!" someone shouted. "Wetin concern us wid America and Europe? Abeg, give us cable TV."
"Remove dis toilet pictures!" said another.
"So our barracks be toilet now?" the police answered. "What an insult!"
"You na mad mad police," Monica said.
"Ok, cable TV no be for free anymore!" the police said.
"But it's our pictures we are watching on cable TV," Madam Aniema said. "Why should we pay you to see ourselves and our people?"
The police answered, "Because government dey complain say cable TV dey misrepresent dis religious crisis. — Uwem Akpan

How could he explain to her that it was better this way, that yes, an object could hold a person, that you could talk to a photograph, that you could kiss a ring, that by breathing into a harmonica, you can give voice to someone far away. But photographs can be lost. In your sleep, a ring can be slipped from your finger by the thief in your barracks. Ga had seen an old man lose the will to live - you could see it go out of him - when a prison guard made him hand over a locket. No, you had to keep the people you loved safer than that. They had to become as fixed to you as a tattoo, which no one could take away. — Adam Johnson

When terrorists blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Reagan was frustrated and furious, as Bush was after 9/11. But he didn't stick us in a war in the Middle East with no exit. — Douglas Brinkley

Now the motif was clear. This trip was their first and last taste of freedom, an interlude between two regimentations: the campus and the barracks. The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers. These boys were 'on their own' in this particular sense. — Aldo Leopold

One day in Auschwitz I became so dispirited that I couldn't carry on. They had given me a beating, which wasn't exactly a pleasant experience. It was on a Sunday, and I said: 'I can't get up'. Then my comrades said: 'That's impossible, you have to get up, otherwise you're lost'. They went to a Dutch doctor, who worked with the German doctor. He came to me in the barracks and said: 'Get up and come to the hospital barracks early tomorrow morning. I'll talk to the German doctor and make sure you are admitted'. Because of that I survived. — Otto Frank

Alai suddenly kissed Ender on the cheek and whispered in his ear, "Salaam." Then, red-faced, he turned away and walked to his own bed at the back of the barracks. Ender guessed that the kiss and the word were somehow forbidden. A suppressed religion, perhaps. Or maybe the word had some private and powerful meaning for Alai alone. — Orson Scott Card

From quite early on, I had this idea of compartmentalized identities - 'this is how you are when you are with your mum, and this is how you are when you are with your dad' - so it seemed like I could never absolutely be myself. And the image of myself as compromised and inconsistent made me want to withdraw from the world even further. I had a sense of formulating a paper-mache version of myself to send out in the world, while I sat controlling it remotely from some smug suburban barracks. — Russell Brand

American tanks were sent to Checkpoint Charlie as a show of strength. Soviet tanks appeared there at about five in the evening on the twenty-seventh. The British soon deployed two antitank guns to support the Americans, while all the French troops in West Berlin remained safely in their barracks. For — Eric Schlosser

She had been an untamed mestiza of the so-called shopkeeper aristocracy: seductive, rapacious, brazen, with a hunger in her womb that could have satisfied an entire barracks. In a few short years, however, she had been erased from the world by her abuse of fermented honey and cacao tablets. Her Gypsy eyes were extinguished and her wits dulled, she shat blood and vomited bile, her sirens body became as bloated and coppery as a three-day-old corpse, and she broke wind in pestilential explosions that startled the mastiffs. She almost never left her bedroom, and when she did she was nude or wearing a silk tunic with nothing underneath, which made her seem more naked than if she wore nothing at all. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

If she's out here and not locked up in the barracks, I'll know," he said. He took a deep breath and whistled.
"You share a whistle?" Trevanion said in disbelief.
"Do you have a problem with that?" Finnikin asked.
"I have a few whistles," Lucian murmured. "Very confusing sometimes."
"Whistles are meant for combat," Trevanion said. "Not wooing women. Women do not understand whistles. — Melina Marchetta

In a secret barracks on the outskirts of Shanghai, three dozen identically faced men moaned uneasily in their sleep, tossed and turned from side to side. They dreamt of violence. They dreamt of fire. They dreamt of death. They woke in a ripple of consciousness. Their mother had died. Their mother was in danger. They rose as one, checked their weapons, checked their bodies. Somewhat calmed by this, they returned to their bunks and eventually to sleep. Their mother might need them soon. — Ramez Naam

FORMING YOUR TROOPS For yu to win trophies, gold and elixir through raiding; then, that is the work of Troops which againg fight against the Goblins on the campaign map or other players. Normal troops are of fifteen types, ten among them get trained in the normal barracks and use elixir while the remaining five get trained in the dark barracks and use dark elixir. There are other hero troops in the game. — Anna Tumbaga

And Tempus thought then that nothing was more worthwhile than what was growing in this whitewashed barracks, where he has come to build a force such as men or gods have never seen - a force worth reckoning with, if you were of a mind. And something was of that mind. And something else opposed it. He should have expected that. Battle in the heavens, battle on the earth. — Janet Morris

Home in Ireland, I went to Collins Barracks and spent some time wandering around, making notes on the various guns, knives and swords. — Sarah Rees Brennan

We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it, to his home, to his centers of entertainment: a total war. It is necessary to prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he may be, make him feel like a cornered beast wherever he may move. Then his moral fiber shall begin to decline, but we shall notice how the signs of decadence begin to disappear. — Che Guevara

Baseball is a lot like the Army, there aren't many individuals. About the only difference is that baseball players get to stay in nice hotels instead of barracks. — Bill Lee

Met two young guys from the Oregon National Guard ... The lieutenant told me about their temporary barracks in an old neighborhood high school. He told me that he was disgusted that kids ever went to school there, and that in Oregon the place would have been bulldozed and rebuilt so that kids could have a proper place to learn. He seemed troubled that all of this was happening in America. He realized that many of the problems he was seeing in New Orleans existed before the storm, and he wanted to know why people had put up with it and why they hadn't voted out of office the people who had let this happen. I told him I didn't know, but maybe we could change things in New Orleans in the future. He seemed hopeful. I felt less certain. — Billy Sothern

I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need their beauty and grandeur. I need their imperious silence. I need it against the witless bellowing of the barracks yard and the witty chatter of the yes-men. I want to hear the rustling of the organ, this deluge of ethereal notes. I need it against the shrill farce of marches. — Pascal Mercier

I opposed the U.S. involvement in Lebanon. We ended up having to withdraw our marines after our barracks were blown up. — John Kasich

Later, she didn't remember how she escaped from his grasp, or how she ended up back in her barracks, but at that moment she realized that something had started that night that changed everything. — Damian Wampler

My homeland,' says the guest, 'no longer exists. My homeland was Poland, Vienna, this house, the barracks in the city, Galicia, and Chopin. What's left? Whatever mysterious substance held it all together no longer works. Everything's come apart. My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded. When that happens, the only thing to do is go away. — Sandor Marai

You must realise now, more clearly than ever, that God is calling you to serve Him in and from the ordinary, secular and civil activities of human life. He waits for us everyday, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fileds, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work. — Josemaria Escriva

Outside events can change a presidential campaign, a president, and the history of the nation: the Iranian hostage crisis, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the downing of the helicopter in Mogadishu, Somalia, the suicide attack on the USS Cole, and, of course, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. — Mark McKinnon

If I didn't forgive the people who took me into the barracks and beat me unconscious over a period of days during the period when the British state was indicted for inhuman and degrading treatment in 1971-72, or even the guys who shot me, if you don't forgive them, you end up with unnecessary baggage. — Gerry Adams

And kitchens and roust out everyone you find. Malo, do the same with the maester's tower and the armory. Ser Brendel, the stables, sept, and barracks. Bring them out into the yard, and try not to kill anyone — George R R Martin

A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of every one of their flock, for ever. — Iain M. Banks

Parliamentarianism means putting political prostitution in barracks. — Karl Kraus

Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? — Michel Foucault

He still wore, in the warming barracks, a muskrat cap with earlaps. Under it his eyes were gray as agates, as sudden as an elbow in the solar plexus. — Wallace Stegner

In the Nazi Arbeit [work] camps back in '44 when a man was caught smoking one cigarette, the whole barracks would die," a patient, Ralph, once told me. "For one cigarette! Yet even so, the men did not give up their inspiration, their will to live and to enjoy what they got out of life from certain substances, like liquor or tobacco or whatever the case may be." I don't know how accurate his account was as history, but as a chronicler of his own drug urges and those of his fellow Hastings Street addicts, Ralph spoke the bare truth: people jeopardize their lives for the sake of making the moment livable. — Gabor Mate

And if somehow my conduct ain't all your fancy paints, why single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints.. From 'Tommy — Rudyard Kipling

He couldn't go into his army's barracks
he had long since learned that the best commanders stay away unless they have some reason to visit. The boys have to have a chance to be at peace, at rest, without someone listening, to favor or despise them depending on the way they talk, and act, and think. — Orson Scott Card

I was never a member of the peace movement or a pacifist, nor was I ever carried away from a demonstration outside a military barracks. Perhaps that's why I don't feel the need to compensate for anything. — Guido Westerwelle

Where are you staying tonight?" Caleb asked reasonably. Lily had no idea; her mind had been so full of Caleb that she hadn't thought about that. Nor had she collected her savings from the bank in Tylerville or bought the equipment she would need to wash clothes. Although the schoolmaster's cottage was a cozy little place, it would require some preparation before she could move in. "You could spend the night with me," he suggested when Lily didn't answer his question. "I've been staying in the barracks, but I have a house." She glared at him. "Forget I said anything," Caleb sighed. And he turned the buggy toward the Tibbet place. — Linda Lael Miller

It may sound a bit like an army barracks, but the truth of the matter is: there must be some time laid aside for arranging, time for working on either a book or an article - I've written two articles in the last four months for the New York Times book review section. — Mel Torme

We had times in '66 and '67 when we would pick up a platoon of privates out of the receiving barracks the week before we even graduated the platoon that we were on! — R. Lee Ermey

My dad got a job in a factory in Philadelphia, so I was raised in Germantown in a sort of a barracks for soldiers. They had housing for temporary housing. And then my parents saved money and bought a little house in South Jersey, built on a swamp. — Patti Smith

The woman dying of cancer in The Barracks facing the raw fear of everything in her life disintegrating. The abused adolescent boy in The Dark whose life is torn open for us. They are such raw books of individuals facing the terrors of life. But then these individuals began to merge more into group portraits. That's not to say he's not still searching for a balance and equilibrium in the face of those horrors - the horrors are always there in McGahern. But the celebration of wonder and of love in the face of fear and terror, the beauty in simple things, become his central preoccupation. He starts to celebrate communal bonds in a way he didn't do at all in the beginning. — John McGahern