Van Winkle Quotes & Sayings

Unfortunately, just like bullets, you can never get words back once they have been sent out into the world. — Clint Van Winkle

I wanted to see my family, but didn't want to leave the other guys. The people waiting for us were strangers, even though I knew every last one of them. — Clint Van Winkle

I guess I was always looking for something. What it was, I didn't know. I wanted help from the VA, but didn't want to go back, didn't want to be subjected to that second-rate treatment any longer. I wanted to find peace within myself, but didn't know how or where to locate it. I wanted to be a sergeant again, a writer, less angry, a better husband, and to ward off the constant bombardment of war-related thoughts. Most of all, I didn't want any more Americans coming home from Iraq in boxes or with jingle-jangled minds. — Clint Van Winkle

No matter what the reason, the ways I tried to justify the situation, the second-guessing that lingered, nothing could change the fact that people stopped existing because of me. — Clint Van Winkle

I wanted people to know that we fired rounds into moving trucks and open windows to survive, not for anyone else's freedom. Not for the Democrats. Not for Republicans. Just to survive. — Clint Van Winkle

The only way to fight the darkness around us is to light a fire within us. — Seth Adam Smith

Everyone I meet now is at least ten years younger than me. I feel like Rip van Winkle with a bald spot. — Jaffe Cohen

I was enjoying the great human trophy hunt and, looking back, it scares the hell out of me — Clint Van Winkle

Most likely, they were writing the same type of macho bullshit that I wrote, trying to sound tough with their words in case words were all that made it home. — Clint Van Winkle

Ours is a culture that dances on the edge of ephemerality. If our servers slept for too long or if we left our iPads unplugged for too long, we'd wake up like Rip Van Winkle to find all of our book culture erased. — Jason Merkoski

All those years I'd drifted along too glassy and insulated for any kind of reality to push through: a delirium which had spun me along on its slow, relaxed wave since childhood, high and lying on the shag carpet in Vegas laughing at the ceiling fan, only I wasn't laughing any more, Rip van Winkle wincing and holding his head on the ground about a hundred years too late. — Donna Tartt

Who supports the troops? The troops support the troops. — Clint Van Winkle

The pumpkin itself is a symbol for mortality. — Seth Adam Smith

The toughest trail I ever ran was the Escarpment in the Catskills of New York State. This was an 18-mile race through Rip Van Winkle country, routed through boulder fields, across angular juttings of granite and along a path with an unrelenting barrage of roots, rocks and mud, all of it hidden under slick leaves and dangling nettles. — Don Kardong

A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use. — Washington Irving

I missed the war and the freedom that came with it. When you are that close to death, you feel free. Every breath you take could be your last. So you inhale and savor each breath, try not to think about your death even though signs of it are all around you. The freedom comes from knowing that if anybody gives you crap, you can eliminate them and the situation. Just shoot and get it over with. — Clint Van Winkle

Rip Van Winkle, who said, Don't make the bed; I'm just going to the bathroom. Never got a dinner! — Red Buttons

I wasn't writing home. I wasn't writing a death letter, either. I was writing a death journal, a piece of fiction meant for my family and my fiancee, Sara. — Clint Van Winkle

The shooting and killing weren't as black-and-white as most people think. The actions live in that hazy area of blown-apart stone walls and hesitations. Sometimes I shot when I shouldn't have; other times I didn't shoot when I should have. There was no way to explain why I did either. Everything happened so fast. Decisions had to be made. After I got home I began to see things in slow motion, see the actions that might've been mistakes. — Clint Van Winkle

By actually taking Sleepy Hollow and the Rip Van Winkle story, and finding the spirit of what was great about both of them and putting them together. So it felt, actually, like one of those ideas that clicked for us, right away, on instinct. — Alex Kurtzman

I'll drink some wine, and then, like a latter-day Van Winkle, I'll lay me down upon this graven stone, lay my head beneath these letters RIP, and close my eyes, according to our family's old practice of falling asleep in times of trouble, and hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time. — Salman Rushdie

I believe in the Rip Van Winkle theory - that a man from 1910 must be able to wake up after being asleep for seventy years, walk into a ballpark, and understand baseball perfectly. — Bowie Kuhn

Rip Van Winkle would be the ideal stock market investor: Rip could invest in the market before his nap and when he woke up 20 years later, he'd be happy. He would have been asleep through all the ups and downs in between. But few investors resemble Mr. Van Winkle. The more often an investor counts his money - or looks at the value of his mutual funds in the newspaper - the lower his risk tolerance. — Richard Thaler

Peace surfaced here. Hard to imagine a person finding peace through war, but no one finds peace in war - peace finds you. It crawls into your sleeping bag and helps you fall asleep, nudges your arm, tells you to turn over, think about home. — Clint Van Winkle

War becomes a part of you. It is a feeling just as much as an experience. If you can't feel it, you weren't paying attention. And if you weren't paying attention, you are probably dead anyway. — Clint Van Winkle

Everyone acted like they knew so much about the war. But none of them really knew anything besides what they had learned through Internet searches or shady half-truths political pundits spouted from the comfort of their news desks. Nothing could ever be flushed out because nobody bothered to ask the troops or look at both sides of the story. — Clint Van Winkle