Top 40 Karl Marlantes Quotes
#1. This nation should be less worried about putting the Vietnam syndrome behind us than restarting the World War II victory syndrome that resulted in the Vietnam syndrome in the first place.
Karl Marlantes
#2. War is society's dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults.
Karl Marlantes
#3. On the other hand, looking careless could just be privileged give-a-shit Ivy League attitude, like wearing duct tape on loafers and jeans with holes in them, knowing all along that they were headed straight to Wall Street or Washington and three-piece suits.
Karl Marlantes
#4. I don't want any romantics to go into the military. I'm not a pacifist. I think we need a military, and the better one we have, the better off we are. I don't want kids going in there thinking that it's John Wayne on Iwo Jima. That's not healthy.
Karl Marlantes
#7. 'The Odyssey' is the great tale, and I was really taken by 'The Iliad,' so I dig into those things, and when I was a kid I didn't. You've gotta have a certain level of understanding yourself before that stuff really starts to resonate.
Karl Marlantes
#8. It won't hurt you. It's just to kill plants. It's called Agent Orange ... and it won't bother humans.
Karl Marlantes
#9. I mean, if you're proud of what you've done when you've served in the military, well then we call that bragging. And if you are unhappy about what happened, we call that complaining. And so what are you going to do?
Karl Marlantes
#10. And I think that it's - the military has actually made improvements, so people are considering post-traumatic stress disorder as, at the least, a possible psychological problem. You know, when I was in Vietnam, it was just considered malingering. And we're making progress.
Karl Marlantes
#11. Without man there would be no evil. But there was also no good, nothing moral built over the world of fact. Humans were responsible for it all.
Karl Marlantes
#12. When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.
Karl Marlantes
#13. Quitting is unthinkable and pain is just weakness leaving the body
Karl Marlantes
#14. We all have shit on our shoes. We've just got to realize it so we don't track it into the house.
Karl Marlantes
#15. The only meaningful statistic in warfare is when the other side quits.
Karl Marlantes
#16. When you are confronted with a seemingly painless moral choice, the odds are that you haven't looked deeply enough.
Karl Marlantes
#17. 'Matterhorn' is my metaphor of the Vietnam War - we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again.
Karl Marlantes
#18. I mean ... if you're raised as a decent human being, killing somebody is against every moral thing you've ever been taught. And so, generally, in combat it's 'krauts,' the 'gooks,' the 'yanks' - whatever you want to do to try and make it so that it's not a human being.
Karl Marlantes
#19. I grew up in Oregon, where as a teenager I worked with my grandfather Axel on his i shing boat at the mouth of the Columbia River.
Karl Marlantes
#20. Over time, continual bad news will discourage any civilian population, and Americans had the lowest tolerance on the planet for bad news.
Karl Marlantes
#21. Victory in combat is like sex with a prostitute. For a moment you forget everything in the sudden physical rush, but then you have to pay your money to the woman showing you the door. You see the dirt on the walls and your sorry image in the mirror.
Karl Marlantes
#22. Vietnam was the first time that Americans of different races had to depend on each other. In the Second World War, they were segregated; it was in Vietnam that American integration happened in the military - and it wasn't easy.
Karl Marlantes
#23. his heart would out-pace his feet and burst. His heart, his whole body, was overflowing with an emotion that he could only describe as love. He
Karl Marlantes
#24. When the peace treaty is signed, the war isn't over for the veterans, or the family. It's just starting.
Karl Marlantes
#25. It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn't know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about
Karl Marlantes
#26. He lay before God as a woman opens herself to a man, with legs apart, stomach exposed, arms open. But unlike some women, he did not have the inner strength that allowed them to do such a thing without fear. There was no woman's strength in Mellas at all.
Karl Marlantes
#27. Dying this way was a better way to die because living this way was a better way to live. The
Karl Marlantes
#28. I choose all over to keep believin'. All along I know Jesus could maybe be just come fairy tale, and I could be just one big fool. I choose anyway.' He turned away from his inward images and returned to the blackness of the world around him. 'It ain't no easy thing.
Karl Marlantes
#29. For every veteran who goes through a divorce, a wife goes through one, too. For every veteran alone in the basement, there is a wife upstairs, bewildered, isolated and in despair from the dark clouds of war that hangs over family life.
Karl Marlantes
#30. The chanting went on, the musicians giving in to the rhythm of their own being, finding healing in touching that rhythm, and healing in chanting about death, the only real god they knew.
Karl Marlantes
#31. How could you get mad at someone who neither needed to attack nor was at all worried about being able to defend? It was like getting mad at Switzerland.
Karl Marlantes
#32. Once we recognize our shadow's existence we must resist the enticing step of going with its flow.
Karl Marlantes
#33. Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.
Karl Marlantes
#34. The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn't teach me how to deal with killing.
Karl Marlantes
#35. I knew many Marines had done brave deeds that no one saw and for which they got no medals at all. I was having a very hard time carrying those medals and didn't have the insight or maturity to know what to do with my combination of guilt and pride.
Karl Marlantes
#36. I began writing 'Matterhorn' in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript.
Karl Marlantes
#37. The time for debilitating fear is before and after the mission.
Karl Marlantes
#38. Everything is touched by the holy when it is in the presence of death.
Karl Marlantes
#39. He knew that all of them were shadows: the chanters, the dead, the living. All shadows, moving across this landscape of mountains and valleys, changing the pattern of things as they moved but leaving nothing changed when they left. Only the shadows themselves could change.
Karl Marlantes
#40. I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.
Karl Marlantes
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