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The Yellow Birds QUOTES

The Yellow Birds QUOTES

41 " I wanted to go to sleep and stay there, that's all. A passive wish, one I didn't push. Sure, there is a fine line between not wanting to wake up and actually wanting to kill yourself, and while I discovered you can walk that line for a long while without even noticing, anybody who is around you surely will... "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

42 " I had the feeling that if I encountered anyone they would intuit my disgrace and would judge me instantly. Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history. At least that's what I thought. Now I know: all pain is the same. Only the details are different. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

43 " And what did it mean that this choice was an illusion, that all choices are illusions, or that if they are not illusions, their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choice of all the other men and women deciding in that moment? "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

44 " I didn't want to smile and say thanks. Didn't want to pretend I'd done anything except survive "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

45 " I was disappearing. It was as if I stripped myself away in that darkened
bedroom on a spring afternoon, and when I was finished there would be a pile of
clothes neatly folded and I would be another number for the cable news shows. I
could almost hear it. "Another casualty today," they'd say, "vanished into thin
air after arriving home." Fine. I leaned down and finished unlacing the boot
and strung the dog tag back around my neck and let it lie against the other.
Left boot and left sock off. Pants off. Underwear off. I was gone. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

46 " I would only sit muttering with envy for their broad umbrellas, their dryness, and the sweet, unwounded banality of their lives. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

47 " Minutes ticked into the past. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

48 " To continue, I had to see the world with clear eyes, to focus on the essential. We only pay attention to rare things, and death was not rare. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

49 " A moment is never long enough to account for tragedy when you are in it. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

50 " For one brief incalculable moment we were not brave or afraid. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

51 " Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

52 " The rest is history, they say. Bullshit, I say. It's imagination or it's nothing, and must be, because what is created in this world can be undone, unmade; the threads of a rope can be unwoven. And if that rope is needed as a guideline for a ferry to a farther shore, then one must invent a way to weave it back, or there will be drownings in the streams that cross our paths. I accept now, though in truth it took some time, that must must be it's own permission. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

53 " And I understood why he came and why I couldn't go, not just then at least, because one never knows if what one sees will disappear forever. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

54 " I feel like I'm being eaten from the inside out and I can't tell anyone what's going on... "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

55 " Life is pain. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

56 " While I slept that summer, the war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

57 " The world makes liars of us all. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

58 " The usual had become remarkable, the remarkable boring, and toward whatever came in between I felt only listless confusion. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

59 " Grief is a practical mechanism, we only grieved those we knew. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds

60 " It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, how what is heard is never quite what was said. "

― Kevin Powers , The Yellow Birds