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1 " War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorsa for the son she has given. "
― Mary Roberts Rinehart
2 " People who try to tell you what the blitz was like in London start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail which crept in and set and became the symbol of the whole thing for them. . . . " It's the glass," says one man, " the sound in the morning of the broken glass being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle." ... An old woman was selling little miserable sprays of sweet lavender. The city was rocking under the bombs and the light of burning buildings made it like day. . . . And in one little hole in the roar her voice got in—a squeaky voice. " Lavender!" she said. " Buy Lavender for luck." The bombing itself grows vague and dreamlike. The little pictures remain as sharp as they were when they were new. "
3 " I remember thinking about how mothers were prepared to run into burning buildings to save their children's lives. I thought I should be able to go through a bit more suffering, a bit more inconvenience to give my children life. It made me feel noble. But now I realize I'm a crazy woman running into a burning house for children who don't exist. "
― Liane Moriarty , What Alice Forgot
4 " I'm just an everyday kind of hero. If the everyday kind saves babies from burning buildings and looks hotter than hell in bunker gear. "
― Lois Greiman , Unmanned (A Chrissy McMullen Mystery, #4)