Word War Two Quotes & Sayings

Well, it beat being tied to a bed and drugged up to the eyeballs. — Pippa DaCosta

War was so many things, and not the least of which confusion. What was wrong? What was right, for that matter?
Was killing right or wrong? Brave or cowardly? Human nature or unnatural behavior of creatures too smart for their own good?
Loyalty, betrayal, hate, love, fear, friendship, teamwork, violence. War was connected to all of these. Hard work, sadness, suffering, discipline, chaos, questions, few answers, strategy, bravery, foolishness, death, life.
And both winning and losing were only two small aspects of the word war. — Kenzie Kovacs-Szabo

When someone wrongs you, you both share the burden of that wrongdoing - the pain of it weighs on both of you. Forgiveness, then, means choosing to bear the full weight all by yourself. — Veronica Roth

I've never let one day go by without painting, or at least without drawing. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he's a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn't stand a word that I wrote. — Robert Scheer

When I went to bed, I stared earnestly at my face in the glass. Was I really good-looking? Honestly I couldn't say I thought so! I hadn't got a straight Grecian nose, or a rosebud mouth, or any of the things you ought to have. It is true that a curate once told me that my eyes were like "imprisoned sunshine in a dark, dark wood" - but curates always know so many quotations, and fire them off at random. I'd much prefer to have Irish blue eyes than dark green ones with yellow flecks! Still, green is a good colour for adventuresses. — Agatha Christie

What shall I tell you of the years that ensued? You know well the recent history of this beleaguered country. I need not to rehash for you those dark days. I tire at the mere thought of writing it, and, besides, the suffering of this country has already been sufficiently chronicled, and by pens far more learned and eloquent than mine.
I can sum it up in one word: war. Or rather, wars. Not one, not two, but many wars, both big and small, just and unjust, wars with shifting casts of supposed heroes and villains, each new hero making one increasingly nostalgic for the old villain. — Khaled Hosseini

What's happening is the language. Not only in the usual sense of being interesting (which it is), but in the new sense that words are events, as real and important in themselves as wars and lovers ... It is to the word, then, that the mind moves, and the word responds by taking on a physicality, even a sensuality, we have all been trained to ignore. Words have weight, and the distance between two can be a chasm filled with forces of association ... What Clark is doing is genuinely new. — Ron Silliman

Alexandre Dumas wrote those lines when he had just turned forty-five and had decided it was time to reflect on his life. He never got past chronicling his thirty-first year - which was well before he had published a word as a novelist - yet he spent more than the first two hundred pages on a story that is as fantastic as any of his novels: the life of his father, General Alexandre - Alex - Dumas, a black man from the colonies who narrowly survived the French Revolution and rose to command fifty thousand men. The chapters about General Dumas are drawn from reminiscences of his mother and his father's friends, and from official documents and letters he obtained from his mother and the French Ministry of War. It is a raw and poignant attempt at biography, full of gaps, omissions, and re-creations of scenes and dialogue. But it is sincere. The story of his father ends with this scene of his death, the point at which the novelist begins his own life story. — Tom Reiss

I know you've taken risks to do these things. Do Please be careful."
"Don't worry about me," he said. "You've got enough troubles on your own plate, my word. But we'll come out all right, so long as we just keep alive, that's all we got to do. Just keep alive another two years, till the war's over. — Nevil Shute

He promised me Berlin," Mum says. "It will kill him if we do not arrive."
"It'd take more than that to kill my Roy. Your lot didn't manage it, did they?"
"But what would happen if the brakes fail, Nell?" Mum dabs at her damp forehead with the hem of her cardigan. "Oh, I do hope Roy can take me home."
"He won't."
"Oh, Nell, can you not let me dream?"
"If hopes and dreams were big ice-creams, the world would be right sticky. Now come on, Bridge. Pull yourself together. Jesus wept, look at the state of you. You're as much use as a knitted knife. — Joanna Campbell

On the second floor was the office in which Houston pounded an ancient typewriter with two fingers, always setting an example of unceasing hard work for his admiring students. They had no hint of the fact that their hard-driving dean had contracted tuberculosis while serving as a GI in France in Word War I. Houstan always seemed vibrant and impassioned in the chase for justice as he tried to expose his students to everything relating to the law that might give them an advantage.
...
"I never worked hard until I got to the Howard Law School and met Charlie Houston," Marshal told me. "I saw this man's dedication, his vision, his willingness to sacrifice, and I told myself, 'You either shape up or ship out.' When you are being challenged by a great human being, you know that you can't ship out."
So Houston rescued Marshall and launched him into a career as one of the greatest lawyers in American history. — Carl T. Rowan

Religion means to know God and to love Him. — A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

And his computer's spell-check always forces him to capitalize the word "Internet". Come on; World War Two earned it's capitalization. The Internet just sucks human beings away from reality. — Douglas Coupland

where fewer than five percent of books sell over 1,000 copies. — Helen Sedwick

All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war. — J.G. Ballard