Top 26 Michael Shaara Quotes
#1. He was one of those, like Stuart, who looked on war as God's greatest game.
Michael Shaara
#2. I wish we could take the hill. Could flood right on over it and end the war, wipe them all away in one great motion. But we can't. No matter how much I wish ... or trust in God ...
Michael Shaara
#3. The great white joker in the sky dooms us all to stupidity or poverty from birth. No two things on earth are equal or have an equal chance, not a leaf or a tree.
Michael Shaara
#4. Longstreet stayed up talking, as long as there was company, as long as there was a fire. Because when the fire was gone and the dark had truly come there was no way he could avoid the dead faces of his children.
Michael Shaara
#5. If men were equal in America, all these Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves.
Michael Shaara
#6. Saw the face of Robert Lee. Incredible eyes. An honest man, a simple man. Out of date. They all ride to glory, all the plumed knights.
Michael Shaara
#7. Everybody knows all the movements. General So and So should have done such and such. God knows we all try. We none of us lose battles on purpose. But now on this field what can we do that's undone?
Michael Shaara
#8. A true gentleman has no vices, but he allows you your own.
Michael Shaara
#9. He suspended thinking; his mind was a bloody vacancy, like a room in which there has been a butchering.
Michael Shaara
#10. In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that enormous, unanswerable question.
Michael Shaara
#11. The earth was actually shuddering. It was as if you were a baby and your mother was shuddering with cold.
Michael Shaara
#12. Why do there have to be men like that, men who enjoy another man's dying?
Michael Shaara
#13. The thing about the heart was that you could not coax it or force it, as you could any other disease. Will power meant nothing.
Michael Shaara
#14. In the dark of the trees he could smell splintered wood and see white upturned faces like wide white dirty flowers.
Michael Shaara
#15. There ought to be more than just that metallic end, and then silence, then the worms, and sometimes he believed, but just this moment he did not believe at all ... there was nothing beyond the sound of the guns ... not even silence, just an end.
Michael Shaara
#16. If you are not affected, if you are not hurt by what we do, then you will not do anything to stop it. The war will simply continue.
Michael Shaara
#17. Perhaps it was only that when you try to put it into words you cannot express it truly, it never sounds as you dream it.
Michael Shaara
#18. I don't really understand it. Never have. The more I think on it the more it horrifies me. How can they look in the eyes of a man and make a slave of him and then quote the Bible?
Michael Shaara
#19. Jackson is gone - not entirely gone; Jackson was there today watching, and Ewell sees his eyes - but you cannot blame him for not being Jackson. You must make do with the tools God has given for the job.
Michael Shaara
#20. Ross said, "They play even during an attack. Not very good. But inspiring. Have you heard the Rebel yell?" Fremantle nodded. "Godawful sound. I expect they learned it from Indians.
Michael Shaara
#21. To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. That is ... a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men.
Michael Shaara
#22. There's nothing so much like a god on earth as a General on a battlefield.
Michael Shaara
#23. It rained all that night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.
Michael Shaara
#24. Southern women like their men religious and a little mad.
Michael Shaara
#25. Lee stopped, looked north. I twas working almost like a plan. It was possible to see Intention in it ... he gave no further directions ... it had never really been in his hands at all. And yet his was the responsibility.
Michael Shaara
#26. A man who has been shot at is a new realist, and what do you say to a realist when the war is a war of ideals?
Michael Shaara
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