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A Rumor of War QUOTES

A Rumor of War QUOTES

1 " Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy. "

― Philip Caputo , A Rumor of War

2 " And men who do not expect to receive mercy eventually lose their inclination to grant it. "

― Philip Caputo , A Rumor of War

3 " The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain. "

― Philip Caputo , A Rumor of War

4 " I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring. Had it not been for the fear that I was going crazy, I would have found it an interesting experience, a trip such as no drug could possibly produce. Asleep and dreaming, I saw dead men living; awake, I saw living men dead. "

― Philip Caputo , A Rumor of War

5 " We had survived, but in war, a man does not have to be killed or wounded to become a casualty. His life, his sight, or limbs are not the only things he stands to lose. "

― Philip Caputo , A Rumor of War

6 " uniforms "

― Philip Caputo , A Rumor of War

7 " So I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war, to endure the same old experiences, suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own. "

― Philip Caputo , A Rumor of War

8 " There was so much human suffering in these scenes that I could not respond to it. "

― Philip Caputo , A Rumor of War

9 " As the citizens of a democracy, the noisy patriots and protestors had a right to their opinions about Vietnam but not, it seemed to me, to the smug righteousness with which they voiced them, because they hadn’t been there. "

― Philip Caputo , A Rumor of War

10 " And if [the writer’s] conscience is clear, his answer to those who in the fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus:—My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, above all to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask. "

― Philip Caputo , A Rumor of War

11 " The combination of exhaustion, anxiety, alcohol, and drugs had the inevitable effect: I had a nervous collapse and spent the next several days in the psychiatric ward of an East Coast hospital, drugged on Thorazine yet happy that no one could get to me. "

― Philip Caputo , A Rumor of War

12 " No writer ever truly succeeds. The disparity between the work conceived and the work completed is always too great, and the writer merely achieves an acceptable level of failure. "

― Philip Caputo , A Rumor of War