Top 51 Kevin Powers Quotes
#1. Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.
Kevin Powers
#2. I smelled the clean house
and the wood-frame bed. It was all filler. The noise, the sound, they existed
just to take up space. My muscles flexed into the emptiness I still called home.
Kevin Powers
#3. My personal opinion is that if someone writes honestly about war, it will inherently be anti-war.
Kevin Powers
#4. We were not destined to survive. The fact is, we were not destined at all.
Kevin Powers
#5. His English was exceptional. There was a glottal sound in his voice, but it was not harsh. I'd often asked him to help me with my sparse Arabic, trying to get my pronunciation of this or that word right. "Shukran." "Afwan." "Qumbula." Thank you. You're welcome. Bomb.
Kevin Powers
#6. I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.
Kevin Powers
#7. All choices are illusions, or if they are not illusions their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all the other men and women deciding anything in that moment.
Kevin Powers
#8. I've come to accept that parts of life are constant, that just because something happens on two different days doesn't make it a goddamn miracle.
Kevin Powers
#9. I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.
Kevin Powers
#10. I wasn't a good student in high school. I wanted to go to college, but they weren't exactly beating down my door to offer me admission, and it's so expensive in the U.S. If you join up for a period, the army will pay your school and provide a stipend.
Kevin Powers
#11. Michael Koryta's THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD is an absolutely thrilling read. I read most of it with my breath held, occasionally exhaling to ask myself, 'What will happen next?' I highly recommend it.
Kevin Powers
#12. 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
#13. I can't envision an honest war novel that left war in a positive light.
Kevin Powers
#14. Noises and smells, those can bring back powerful memories. I remember when I was going to school one Fourth of July, and there were a lot of fireworks going off. I knew that I was in Richmond. I knew that I was a college student. But I thought people were shooting at me.
Kevin Powers
#15. I understand that it's incredibly difficult to watch what's happening on the news every day and not become inured to it. I've fallen victim to that myself, wanting to look away.
Kevin Powers
#16. I think a lot of the guys I know and a lot of people I've talked to, what they want is very often what most people want, a kind of simple life, a livelihood, a family, people who care about them, people they can care about. I think vets on the whole want the same things that everybody else does.
Kevin Powers
#17. But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed.
Kevin Powers
#18. Writing was always an aspiration, but I'd kept it a secret even from myself.
Kevin Powers
#19. I had feared the truth on her behalf and it had not been my right to make that choice for her.
Kevin Powers
#20. We'd had small lives, populated by a longing for something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams.
Kevin Powers
#21. Through those drooping branches the city sprawled out haphazardly like a drunk on a sidewalk, fallen where he may.
Kevin Powers
#22. 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
#23. It's not just: you get off the plane, you're back home, everything's fine. Maybe the physical danger ends, but soldiers are still deeply at risk of being injured in a different way.
Kevin Powers
#24. People are going to die," he said flatly. "It's statistics." Then he got up and left the room.
Kevin Powers
#25. Her grief was dignified and hidden, as is most grief, which is partly why there is always so much of it to go around.
Kevin Powers
#26. There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told and what is true.
Kevin Powers
#27. I didn't want to smile and say thanks. Didn't want to pretend I'd done anything except survive
Kevin Powers
#28. Freedom is not the same as lack of accountability.
Kevin Powers
#29. I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn't mind. The world makes liars of us all.
Kevin Powers
#30. Joining the military is not to be taken lightly. You're putting every part of yourself at risk, not just your body but your moral and spiritual centre.
Kevin Powers
#31. I wanted something that I could look back on and say, yes, you were fighting too, you burned to be alive, and whatever failure or accident of nature caused you to be killed could be explained by something other than the fact that I'd missed your giving up.
Kevin Powers
#33. The details of the world in which we live are always secondary to the fact that we must live in them.
Kevin Powers
#34. One of the things my service in Iraq did give me was this freedom from fear of failure or any kind of expectations that I had to take a standard path.
Kevin Powers
#35. Clouds spread out over the Atlantic like soiled linens on an unmade bed.
Kevin Powers
#36. To understand the world, one's place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning.
Kevin Powers
#37. All pain is the same. Only the details are different.
Kevin Powers
#38. I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.
Kevin Powers
#39. I would only sit muttering with envy for their broad umbrellas, their dryness, and the sweet, unwounded banality of their lives.
Kevin Powers
#40. I didn't want to be responsible for him. I had enough to worry about. I was disintegrating, too. How was I supposed to keep us both in tact?
Kevin Powers
#41. As human beings, we have the blessing and the curse that we're able to adapt to almost anything. No matter how extreme the circumstances you're in, they become normal.
Kevin Powers
#42. I'm always most interested in writing about things that I don't understand.
Kevin Powers
#43. A new patina whitening the walls with marks of memories, all running together as if the memories themselves aspired to be the walls in which I was imprisoned ...
Kevin Powers
#44. The war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on.
Kevin Powers
#46. There was no center to the world. The curves of all our bells are cracked.
Kevin Powers
#47. I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive.
Kevin Powers
#48. The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren't any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood.
Kevin Powers
#49. Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history.
Kevin Powers
#50. I feel like I'm being eaten from the inside out and I can't tell anyone what's going on ...
Kevin Powers
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
