Soldier Of Love Quotes & Sayings

We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment. — Marcel Proust

The unrelenting grip of Soldier's Syndrome slips finger by slow finger. The marrow's been affected - emotional leukemia at the deepest level. Transplants of love and friendship aid healing, yet time is still key, and the clock never ticks fast enough. Eternity gains perspective when seconds feel like years. How long have I been gone? Six eternities and counting. — Chila Woychik

As a soldier in the US Army, I was prepared to do whatever was asked of me because I believed, down to my soul, that the uniform I'd wear as a Ranger represented the defense of liberty and freedom, and the country I love. I'd chosen to serve because I could fight and because until wars stopped happening, people like me were needed. I had zero problem doing whatever it took to keep harm from coming to innocent people. Zero problem. Period, exclamation point, and freakin' hooah. — Veronica Rossi

What is this peace, different from that which the world gives? This peace is the one your love gives ... a peace greater than suffering, not a peace without war, but a peace in spite of war, during war, above war, the peace of the soul, having, through love, its whole life in heaven and thus enjoying the peace of heaven in spite of everything which may happen on earth around it and against it. - from Michel Carrouges, Soldier of the Spirit — Charles De Foucauld

To keep something, you must take care of it. More, you must understand just what sort of care it requires. You must know the rules and abide by them. She could do that. She had been doing it all the months, in the writing of her letters to him. There had been rules to be learned in that matter, and the first of them was the hardest: never say to him what you want him to say to you. Never tell him how sadly you miss him, how it grows no better, how each day without him is sharper than the day before. Set down for him the gay happenings about you, bright little anecdotes, not invented, necessarily, but attractively embellished. Do not bedevil him with the pinings of your faithful heart because he is your husband, your man, your love. For you are writing to none of these. You are writing to a soldier. — Dorothy Parker

No more light answers. Let our officers
Have note what we purpose. I shall break
The cause of our expedience to the Queen
And get her leave to part. For not alone
The death of Fulvia, with more urgent touches,
Do strongly speak to us, but the letters too
Of many our contriving friends in Rome
Petition us at home. Sextus Pompeius
Hath given the dare to Caesar and commands
The empire of the sea. Our slippery people,
Whose love is never linked to the deserver
Till his deserts are past, begin to throw
Pompey the Great and all his dignities
Upon his son, who - high in name and power,
Higher than both in blood and life - stands up
For the main soldier; whose quality, going on,
The sides o' th' world may danger. Much is breeding
Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life
And not a serpent's poison. — William Shakespeare

Once upon a time there was a Scottish SAS soldier in Kabul. He met a Soviet Spetsnaz soldier. They were enemies first, then shagged for nine years, fell in love at some stage. Dragons, battles, and damsels in distress in between, until an evil wizard took the Spetsnaz away. The Scot and the damsel battled the vile foes, until the Russian returned, but the evil spell still hat him in its claws. More dragons, battles, knights in not-so shiny armour later, the spell got broken, the Princes got reunited, and our Russian and Scotsman kind of lived happily ever after. (Dan) — Aleksandr Voinov

The motivation I possessed to serve my country is what got me out of the small town of Lyons, Texas where I grew up, and into the world of service, love of country, helping others, and being an American soldier." (Page 90). — Kenneth A. Bracewell

Does a soldier go to war in order to kill the enemy? no, he goes in order to die for his country.
Does a wife want to show her husband how happy she is? no, she wants him to see how she suffers in order to make him happy
Does the husband go to work thinking he will find personal fulfillment there? no, he is giving his sweat and tears for the good of the family
And so it goes on: sons give up their dreams to please their parents, parents give up their lives in order to please their children; pain and suffering are used to justify the one thing that should bring only LOVE.. — Paulo Coelho

How can you love me?" she asked, forcing herself to say the words that would kill the tenderness in his eyes. "You don't even know me. You know 'Lady Agatha,' a composite, a character, a role I played."

He shook his head, his negation gentle but certain. "I didn't fall in love with a character, a title, or an occupation. I didn't fall in love with you because of your past or despite it.
"I love you because of your intensity and passion, because you make me want to be better than I am, because seeing my reflection in your eyes makes me better than I am. I love you because you laugh easily and honestly. I love you because you carried an ugly mutt into a drawing room as though it were a prince and because you gave an old soldier a strawberry trifle. I love you, Letty. — Connie Brockway

Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. — Tim O'Brien

She had witnessed the world's most beautiful things, and allowed herself to grow old and unlovely. She had felt the heat of a leviathan's roar, and the warmth within a cat's paw. She had conversed with the wind and had wiped soldier's tears. She had made people see, she'd seen herself in the sea. Butterflies had landed on her wrists, she had planted trees. She had loved, and let love go. So she smiled. — Sonya Hartnett

Mellas was transported outside himself, beyond himself. It was as if his mind watched eveything coolly while his body raced wildly with passion and fear. He was frightened beyond any fear he had ever known. But this brilliant and intense fear, this terrible here and now, combined with the crucial significance of every movement of his body, pushed him over a barrier whose existence he had not known about until this moment. He gave himself over completely to the god of war within him. — Karl Marlantes

How can you care for a rough man like me?' he asked me. 'How can you love a man who can bring you no lands but the farm a soldier's pension can buy? Who can give your children no title of nobility?' Because love does not do sums, I should have told him. Love makes choices, and then gives its all. Had he seen himself as I first saw him though, he could have had no questions. — Tad Williams

And he likes to torment me, and laughs when I get upset when he does. No, of course not. I do not love Jack Elliot. He is low and coarse and a soldier, and not the kind of man I want to spend my life with. — Nancy E. Turner

Being different doesn't make you broken. Look at me, I'm the smallest elf in all of the AAD. My father was a toy soldier, yet I have no discernible skills whatsoever. I might feel a little lost at times, but I'm not broken — Charlie Cochet

It was in this atmosphere of war, heroism, and controversy that my wife's grandmother, Johanna Boel Sigurdardottir, met and fell in love with Samuel Emmett Hearn Jr. He was a gallant soldier, and she was a natural beauty. — Gudjon Bergmann

Artillerymen have a love for their guns which is perhaps stronger than the feeling of any soldier for his weapon or any part of his equipment. — Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall

Rostov was not listening to the soldier. He looked at the snowflakes dancing above the fire and remembered the Russian winter with a warm, bright house, a fluffy fur coat, swift sleighs, a healthy body, and all the love and care of a family. "And why did I come here?" he wondered. — Leo Tolstoy

And Jesus, in response, created for Himself a sort of daily compassion (not empathy, of which He seemed to have little, at least to Amos), but a cobbled-together will-to-patience that was born not of His divinity, but of His humility. Amos said he'd imagined Jesus so many times repeating under His breath, "Don't smite them, don't smite them, they're really just a bunch of morons and are in enough trouble already," repeating it as He healed the hemorrhaging woman, the blind man, the soldier, people He did not love but took mercy upon anyway. — Haven Kimmel

The basic principles of the military services are unchangeable. Courage and candor, obedience and comradeship, love of fatherland and loyalty to the State: these are ever the distinguishing characteristics of the soldier and sailor. Building character through intelligent training and education is always the first and greatest goal. — Erich Raeder

Arin took the basket from her. "Coming or going?"
"I've a errand here, and won't be home until late."
"Shall I guess what brings you to town?"
"You can try."
He peeked in the basket. Bread, still warm from the oven. A bottle of liquor. Long, flat, pieces of wood. Rolls of gauze. "A picnic ... with a wounded soldier? Sarsine," he teased, "is it true love? What's the wood for? Wait, don't tell me. I'm not sure I want to know."
She swatted him. "The cartwright's oldest daughter has a broken arm. — Marie Rutkoski

Jesus humbled himself. He went from commanding angels to sleeping in the straw. From holding stars to clutching Mary's finger. The palm that held the universe took the nail of a soldier. Why? Because that's what love does. It puts the beloved before itself. — Max Lucado

All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. Like sickness, it threatens pain and death. Like poverty, it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat, thirst, and hunger. Like slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice, and arbitrary rule. Like exile, it separates you from all you love. Like the gallies, it imprisons you at close quarters with uncongenial companions. It threatens every temporal evil - every evil except dishonour and final perdition, and those who bear it like it no better than you would like it. — C.S. Lewis

A soldier when aged is not appreciated; the love of an old man sickens. — Ovid

It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses - say mother love or patriotism - are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad ... There are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people's children or countries. — Timothy Keller

I am in love with a dragon.
Let the Order condemn me, I mused, perhaps my first truly rebellious thought in a lifetime. Let them call me a traitor and hunt me down. For thirteen years, I had followed commands, livid by the rigid code of St. George, become their perfect soldier, only to discover the Order I'd dedicated my life to was wrong. Everything I thought I'd knew was a lie. The only real thing was the girl in my arms. — Julie Kagawa

DON Luigi Giussani used to quote this example from Bruce Marshall's novel To Every Man a Penny. The protagonist of the novel, the abbot Father Gaston, needs to hear the confession of a young German soldier whom the French partisans are about to sentence to death. The soldier confesses his love of women and the numerous amorous adventures he has had. The young priest explains that he has to repent to obtain forgiveness and absolution. The soldier answers, "How can I repent? It was something that I enjoyed, and if I had the chance I would do it again, even now. How can I repent?" Father Gaston, who wants to absolve the man who has been marked by destiny and who's about to die, has a stroke of inspiration and asks, "But are you sorry that you are not sorry?" The young man answers impulsively, "Yes, I am sorry that I am not sorry." In other words, he apologizes for not repenting. The door was opened just a crack, allowing absolution to come in ... . — Pope Francis

Some say an army of horsemen some an army on foot others say ships laden for war are the fairest things on earth. But I say the fairest sight on this dark earth is the face of the one you love. Nor is it hard to understand: love has humbled the hearts of the proudest queens. And I would rather see you now stepping over my threshold than any soldier greaved in gold or any iron-beaked ship. — Alison Croggon

The children are innocent until proven guilty. For their sake, not ours, we must soldier on, muddling our way toward frugality, simplicity, liberty, community, until some kind of sane and rational balance is achieved between our ability to love and our cockeyed ambition to conquer and dominate everything in sight. No wonder the galaxies recede from us in every direction, fleeing at velocities that approach the speed of light. They are frightened. We humans are the Terror of the Universe. — Edward Abbey

To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. That is ... a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men. — Michael Shaara

I dreamed of chasing Selah through a field of daisies when a Redcoat started pulling on my arm. It did not take long to realize that Matthew was tugging on my arm, not a soldier.
"Go away. I was out late. I want sleep." Not to mention that I liked dreaming of chasing my love in a field of daises. — Sarah Holman

A.E.Housman'

No one, not even Cambridge was to blame
(Blame if you like the human situation):
Heart-injured in North London, he became
The Latin Scholar of his generation.

Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,
Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;
Food was his public love, his private lust
Something to do with violence and the poor.

In savage foot-notes on unjust editions
He timidly attacked the life he led,
And put the money of his feelings on

The uncritical relations of the dead,
Where only geographical divisions
Parted the coarse hanged soldier from the don. — W. H. Auden

For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can't help but love. — Tim O'Brien

A soldier is the most-trusted profession in America. Americans have trust in you because you trust each other. No matter how difficult times are, those of us who love the Army must stick with it. — Richard A. Kidd

A man who wears a sword knows to hold the love of his wife and family dear, for at any time he may not see another day of it. — Aleksandra Layland

I'm no poet. I'm a soldier. So, I'll just tell you the way it is, as clumsy as it sounds. When I first saw you, it was like being thrown from a shuttle before it touched the ground. I fell and when I landed, I felt it in every cell of my body. You disturbed me. You took away my inner peace. You left me drifting. I wanted you right there. Them as I learned more of you, I wanted you even more. You want me too. I've seen it in your eyes. You taught me the meaning of loneliness, because when I don't see you, I feel alone. You may reject me, you may deny yourself, and if you choose to not accept me, I will abide be your decision. But know that there will never be another one like you for me and one like me for you. We both waited years so we could meet. — Ilona Andrews

I am going to the City myself, human girl. After my mother was widowed, my siblings and I went each our separate ways: M-Through-S to be a governess, T-Through-Z to be a soldier, and I to seek our old grandfather - the Municipal Library of Fairyland, which owns all the books in all the world. I hope that he will accept me and love me as a grandson and teach me to be a librarian, for every creature must know a trade. I know I have bad qualities that stand against me - a fiery breath being chief among these - but I am a good beast, and I enjoy alphabetizing, and perhaps, I may get some credit for following in the family business." The Wyverary pursed his great lips. "Perhaps we might travel together for a little while? Those beasts with unreliable fathers must stick together after all. And I may be a good deal of help in the arena of Locating Suppers. — Catherynne M Valente

The chief bond of the soldier is his oath of allegiance and love for the flag. — Seneca The Younger

Let us plant the seeds of love and harmony.
Peace tree will grow and will vanish agony.
Let us plant the seeds of trust and kindness.
Children's will bloom with joy and happiness.
Let us plants the seeds of education but not war.
Our children will grow not a soldier but a philosopher.
Let us plant the seeds of vision and compassion.
Our children will learn to love with joy and passion. — Debasish Mridha

We can make peace in this land
We are courageous soldier of peace
with Loving heart and caring hand.
We can bring joy in this land
We are joyful, we are blissful
With loving heart and caring hand.
We can bring kindness in this land
We are hopeful, we are faithful
With loving heart and caring hand.
We can bring harmony in this land
We have different color and religion
But with loving heart and caring hand. — Debasish Mridha

Cervantes, the soldier and adventurer, rose above the prejudices of his class, while Shakespeare never lifted his eyes beyond the narrow horizon of the Court to which he catered. It was love that opened Cervantes's eye, and it is in all-embracing love that Shakespeare was deficient. — William Shakespeare

The soldier of Christ is obligated to fight against sin and error. His battle against the Antichrist is prompted by his loved for Christ, and for the salvation of souls. He fights this battle for the salvation of those who have gone astray. His attitude is one of true love. But those who flee from the inevitable battle, and treat irenically those who have gone astray, obfuscating their error and playing down their revolt against God, are, fundamentally, victims of egoism and complacency. — Dietrich Von Hildebrand

The Renaissance did not break completely with mediaeval history and values. Sir Philip Sidney is often considered the model of the perfect Renaissance gentleman. He embodied the mediaeval virtues of the knight (the noble warrior), the lover (the man of passion), and the scholar (the man of learning). His death in 1586, after the Battle of Zutphen, sacrificing the last of his water supply to a wounded soldier, made him a hero. His great sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella is one of the key texts of the time, distilling the author's virtues and beliefs into the first of the Renaissance love masterpieces. His other great work, Arcadia, is a prose romance interspersed with many poems and songs. — Ronald Carter

Pallas's mouth opened. Damen saw what Pallas saw: Laurent like some dream of a newly fucked virgin, himself unmistakably above him, fully roused. He flushed all over. In Ios, he might have dallied with a lover while a household slave attended to some task in the room, but only because a slave was so far beneath him in status as not to signify. The idea of a soldier watching him make love to Laurent was breaking open his mind. Laurent had never even taken an acknowledged lover before, let alone - Pallas — C.S. Pacat

You're the reason why selfless soldiers won't be kicked out of the military because of who they are or who they love. — Barack Obama

He wasn't like some of the hippies in England, where the qualification to rebel is planted by the guilt raised from being a spoilt child with a good education. He was a real hippy born from being forced to kill for his army until he was twenty one. He had long hair because the army made him shave his head. The army made him shave every day too. Now he had a beard. His face for a long time was not his own. When this guy said he was all about peace he wasn't talking about peace because his mum never got him the horse he wanted for his eighteenth birthday, he was talking about peace because he'd seen war. He talked about love because he knew hate: hate for those above him, hate for those he had served with, hate for enemies not born his but who became so and, lastly, hate for himself for how his mind had been controlled. — Craig Stone

We feasted on love; every mode of it, solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. She was my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign, my trusty comrade, friends, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress, but at the same time all that any man friend has ever been to me. — C.S. Lewis

I love a brave soldier who has undergone the baptism of fire. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love. — Guy Sajer

For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone.
"What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and within, her two books beneath her arm returned again, much as a soldier prepares for battle. — Virginia Woolf

As he moves through his day, sometimes he stops and just stares at me. There is something on the tip of his tongue. But he doesn't say it. I'm not sure he knows what it is. — Melissa Seligman

Your government has problems ... my government has problems. I can't be a judge. All I can do is be an ambassador of love. I'm a musician, not a soldier, and if I'm invited to a place in order to play and bring love, I'll always accept the invitation. — Meshell Ndegeocello

There is more joy in heaven over a converted sinner than over a righteous person standing firm. A leader in battle has more love for a soldier who returns after fleeing, and who valiantly pursues the enemy, than for one who never turned back, but who never acted valiantly either. A farmer has greater love for land which bears fruitfully, after he has cleared it of thorns, than for land which never had thorns but which never yielded a fruitful harvest. — Pope Gregory I

And while thou
livest, dear Kate, take a fellow of plain and
uncoined constancy; for he perforce must do thee
right, because he hath not the gift to woo in other
places: for these fellows of infinite tongue, that
can rhyme themselves into ladies' favours, they do
always reason themselves out again. What! a
speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad. A
good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; a
black beard will turn white; a curled pate will grow
bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will wax
hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the
moon; or, rather, the sun, and not the moon; for it
shines bright and never changes, but keeps his
course truly. If thou would have such a one, take
me; and take me, take a soldier; take a soldier,
take a king. And what sayest thou then to my love?
speak, my fair, and fairly, I pray thee — William Shakespeare

This I said in the Irish way, about which there is allowed to be something very engaging. It's a remarkable thing, and a testimony to the love with which our nation is regarded, that this address scarce ever fails in a handsome fellow. I cannot tell how often I have seen a private soldier escape the horse, or a beggar wheedle out a good alms, by a touch of the brogue. — Robert Louis Stevenson

It is something that cannot be explained or even understood until you've lived it; a man can't know or fully appreciate his life until he's been close enough to taste the end of it, and the bonds forged in battle are some of the strongest a man could ever have. We are brothers, the men of ODA 022, and though we didn't have the same blood running through our veins, we had all shed the blood of others together, and knew that none of us would hesitate to step in the way of fate and take a round or jump on a grenade to save one another. — Robert Patrick Lewis

Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth by falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages. A peace will equally leave the warrior and the relater of wars destitute of employment; and I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie. — Samuel Johnson

In that instant, your billboard careened ashore on a wall of water, cracking the back of my head. I reached for balance and touched what I thought was a puppy. Then you grabbed my finger. My God, I thought. It's a baby. I fainted dead away. That's how Macon found us the next day - me unconscious on half a billboard, you nestled in my arms, nursing on the pocket of my uniform. The half billboard said: " ... Cafe ... Proprietor." Our path seemed clear.
I will always love your mother for letting you go, Soldier, and I will always love you for holding on.
Love, the Colonel.
PS: I apologize for naming you Moses. I didn't know you were a girl until it was too late. — Sheila Turnage

Yeah. You treat him like a son or a soldier, instead of like a brother. He wants you to like him and admire him and love him. Maybe in that order. — Faith Hunter

Ember pressed close, brushing my shoulder with hers, and my pulse spiked. I looked over, saw the fierce determination in her gaze and felt a defiant growl rumble in my throat as a hot, vicious rage spread through my veins. Ember was mine. The other half of me. And i would fight Talon, St. George and the entire damned world to keep her safe — Julie Kagawa

The War Sonnets: V. The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. — Rupert Brooke

We're at war.
On the verge of an apocalypse filled with monsters and torture in a nightmare world.
And I'm standing here, a moonstruck teenager pining for an enemy soldier. What am I, crazy?
This time, I'm the first to turn away. — Susan Ee

In the soldier we see the love of country. When you are willing to go onto a battlefield and give your life to defend an ideal ... knowing that you may not live through day. — Frederick Lenz

I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn't expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was continuously in doubt? Since Belgorod, terror had overturned all my preconceptions, and the pace of life had been so intense one no longer knew what elements of ordinary life to abandon in order to maintain some semblance of balance. I was still unresigned to the idea of death, but I had already sworn to myself during moments of intense fear that I would exchange anything - fortune, love, even a limb - if I could simply survive. — Guy Sajer

stay curious and stay the brave, strong, unrelenting soldier of love that you are. — AVA.

Those renowned generals [Alexander and Caesar] received more faithful service, and performed greater actions by means of the love their soldiers bore them, than they could possibly have done, if instead of being beloved and respected they had been hated and feared by those they commanded. — Benjamin Franklin

Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and ask every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow. — Ben Fountain

Any child soldier has to go through a lot of love, care and understanding to become normal. — Emmanuel Jal

He prizes me as a soldier would a good weapon, and that is all. [ ... ] Can I receive from him the bridal ring, endure all the forms of love [ ... ] and know that the spirit was quite absent? Can I bear the consciousness that every endearment he bestows is a sacrifice made on principle? No: such a martyrdom would be monstrous. I will never undergo it. — Charlotte Bronte

Gentlemen, do you know what is the finest speech that I ever in my life heard or read? It is the address of Garibaldi to his Roman soldiers, when he told them: "Soldier, what I have to offer you is fatigue, danger, struggle and death; the chill of the cold night in the free air, and heat under the burning sun; no lodgings, no munitions, no provisions, but forced marches, dangerous watchposts and the continual struggle with the bayonet against batteries;- - those who love freedom and their country may follow me." That is the most glorious speech I ever heard in my life. — Lajos Kossuth

The sorrow of war inside a soldier's heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a daness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past. The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person. If you focused on any one event it would soon become a tearing pain. — Bao Ninh

He chuckled. "I cannot speak for other men, but I want the woman who stumbles over a word like virgin and can say whore without raising a blush." His smile faded and he spoke soberly. "Your soldier ... your first love ... and every circumstance that followed in some way brought you to me, and while I can wish that you had never had your heart hurt, that you had never suffered even a moment of doubt, of pain, of sadness ... of betrayal, I also know that you would in some way be changed. It would have made your life different. Mine also." North gave her hand a light squeeze. "Whether we are shaped by the circumstances of our lives, or by our perceptions of them, I still find I very much admire the shape you have become. — Jo Goodman

The marine corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist. Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swabjockies, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because those candyasses don't know how to be miserable.
The artist committing himself to his calling has to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not, he will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that marine: he has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier, or swabbie, or desk jockey, because this is war, baby, and war is hell. — Steven Pressfield

These are the problems of the modern U.S. combat soldier, the constant worry about overstepping the mark and an American media that delights in trying to knock us down. Which we have done nothing to deserve. Except, perhaps, love our country and everything it stands for. — Marcus Luttrell

I'll tell you what I'm fighting for. Not for England, nor her allies, nor any patriotic cause. It's all come down to the hope of being with you.. — Lisa Kleypas

When I am saying all of this, she is just looking at me and I am seeing water in her eye. So I am saying to her, if I am telling this to you it will be making you to think that I am some sort of beast or devil. Amy is never saying anything when I am saying this, but the water is just shining in her eye. And I am saying to her, fine. I am all of this thing. I am all of this thing, but I am also having mother once, and she is loving me. — Uzodinma Iweala