Top 100 Quotes About War Stories
#1. Listen to me, convict. I have not traveled all this way to listen to your war stories. So shut your trap before I shut it for you.
Commander Julius Root
Eoin Colfer
#2. War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.
Richard Flanagan
#3. Good teaching is creating really interesting generalizations out of war stories.
Derek Bok
#4. There are no war stories. I ended up a bombardier, but I never got overseas. And it wasn't because I was playing baseball either. It was just a series of things that went on.
Bobby Thomson
#5. People should be able to tell stories that are important to them to try and understand what they mean. I don't think you figure anything out on your own. Certainly not war stories.
Phil Klay
#6. I never liked telling war stories. Some men love to tell them. Hell, some men need to. They need to convince themselves that the war is over. But I'm not one of them.
Paul Allor
#7. I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.
Catherynne M Valente
#8. Anyone who has been in business can tell war stories about the bumps in the road. But if they've outlasted the competition, ask for their stories about survival. They've figured out how to turn disappointments into opportunities.
Harvey MacKay
#9. War stories, westerns, spy stories are all accepted as respectable because they are read by men. It is only women's light reading which is derided.
Charlotte Lamb
#10. The tendency to separate war stories from immigrant stories means that most Americans don't understand how many of the immigrants and refugees in the United States have fled from wars - many of which this country has had a hand in. Although
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#11. The last element in drama is high stakes. War, of course, is life and death - survival, not only for the story's characters, but often for the society itself. That's why I'm drawn to stories that are built around wars, even if they're not technically "war stories."
Steven Pressfield
#12. He was telling war stories. The funny, innocuous ones that made everyone forget that war could leave you without fingers, or legs, or a soul.
Sabrina Fedel
#13. My mother went to Radcliffe, and rather than just trying to get rich, she wanted to be a teacher and taught for over 30 years in the public schools. She's definitely got some war stories.
Ben Affleck
#14. I like to tell people that I have the best job in the media. All I do is hang around with heroes. I do that every week for my 'War Stories' documentary series - and when FOX News wants - I go off and cover the young Americans we send to places like Afghanistan or Iraq.
Oliver North
#15. Do you know the Guardians?" I asked Zay. "Is there some kind of club or yearly get-together where Guardians get drunk, wear funny hats, and compare war stories?
Devon Monk
#16. I see the reports of Anson Hunter's death have been greatly exaggerated ... and I trust so are his war stories.
Richard Finney
#17. War is, after all, the universal perversion ... war stories, the pornography of war.
John Rae
#18. I made 'Saving Private Ryan' for my father. He's the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.
Steven Spielberg
#19. I never wanted to do anything else but fight, when I was a kid. I never had any broader perspective of my own perspective. I didn't know anything about anything else. I just wanted to fight until I could fight no more, and then I wanted to own a bar and drink and tell war stories.
Mike Tyson
#20. War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.
David Mamet
#21. Most politicians - those people who live, eat and breathe politics - like to sit around and talk about politics and tell political war stories. Reagan didn't do that. His war stories were movie war stories and Hollywood war stories. He loved that.
Lyn Nofziger
#22. Humans don't leap buildings. Stuntmen with harnesses do. And won't my crashing eight stories to the ground be detrimental to the mission? The dark elves will swarm me and take me hostage instantly."
"That might be true, but you're not going to fall," he said.
Amanda Carlson
#23. Would you believe in a story without the heroes? There are stories without heroes.
Pushpa Rana
#24. Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.
Kristin Hannah
#25. My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.
Haruki Murakami
#26. You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.
Alexandra Fuller
#27. Today it is an amazing, if unexpected, legacy of Star Wars that so many gifted writers are contributing new stories to the Saga.
George Lucas
#29. We must let the world know children's stories and we must take effective protective, legal and political actions to ensure that as many children as possible are spared the brutalities of war. Our joint action has, and will, make a difference, if only we make the effort.
Radhika Coomaraswamy
#30. For some stories, it's easy. The moral of 'The Three Bears,' for instance, is Never break into someone else's house.' The moral of 'Snow White' is 'Never eat apples.' The moral of World War I is 'Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.
Lemony Snicket
#31. If history only remembers one in a thousand of us, then that future will be filled with stories of who we were and what we did.
Electronic Arts
#32. World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good and evil. I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years.
Ken Follett
#33. It's a war. Wars aren't like that." "Aren't like what?" Roberts said. "Aren't like stories about wars," Vandercaust answered solemnly. "Stories about wars come after.
James S.A. Corey
#34. There's so much more to tell about Africa than the usual stories about war, famine and disease.
Komla Dumor
#35. All the papers contained nothing but fantastic stories about the war. However, for several months we had been accustomed to war talk. We had so often packed our service trunks that the whole thing had become tedious.
Manfred Von Richthofen
#36. Maybe the next three Star Wars movies will tell the story of how the last three Star Wars movies got so shitty.
Dana Gould
#37. There were always the stories, of course, the war legends, but who - other than himself, in Jhesh's tavern, increasingly wearily - still told those?
Richard K. Morgan
#38. I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.
Tim O'Brien
#39. [T]hose most precious memories are hidden in the safest place of all. Safe from fire or floods or war. In stories. Stories remembered, until they are ready to be told. Or perhaps simply ready to be heard.
Aminatta Forna
#41. I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it's an abstract thing that's felt differently for all the characters.
Phil Klay
#42. I generally don't follow domestic news that much aside from how it relates to the stories I'm covering abroad, like what Americans think of the War in Afghanistan.
Lynsey Addario
#43. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.
Omar El Akkad
#44. All family stories are important, just as all people are important, and they deserve to be passed along.
Karen Chamberlain
#45. My dad was in the Second World War with General Patton. He won medals for bravery, but he came home quite damaged, so he was a handful. He told us some terrible stories, and I guess you'd say he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Jerry Hall
#46. I'm a veteran, and I come from a family of veterans and people who served in that war. And the stories that I heard were a hell of a lot different than the movies that I was seeing, so I wanted to make a movie about the people that were really there.
David Ayer
#47. All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction.
Javier Cercas
#48. All these stories are grist to the mill of the government because they build up a very useful war psychosis.
Helen Suzman
#49. Why should Americans care about the Nazi back story in World War II? If you don't have the Nazi back story in World War II, World War II is simply not comprehensible.
Peter Bergen
#50. Your love has build me from strength to strength. It has made me a stronger and better person than I was. There is nothing that love cannot change darling. Once you fall in love, even wars turn to love stories.
Thomas More
#51. Unscrupulous agitators have been at work spreading atrocity stories which can only be compared with those lies that were fabricated by the same instigators at the beginning of the Great War.
Adolf Hitler
#52. Bhagat Singh wanted to plan something new against the British. He stayed calm for some time and studied about the lives of the protestors of Russia, Italy and Ireland. These stories inspired him for war against the British.
Simran
#53. our ancestors have told stories of war, love, mysteries, and the miraculous performances of lower animals and inanimate objects.
Lemuel Arthur Pittenger
#54. Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.
Ulysses S. Grant
#55. The stories from World War I are worse than anything I have ever read.
Kerry Greenwood
#56. I am a survivor. But I am not unique of the people that survived the great late war. We all have our stories to tell. But for most of us the hardened corners have soften with the passage of time.
Nancy B. Brewer
#57. They've heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. Then they get a taste of battle.
George R R Martin
#58. My mother told stories - of their life in the war and how she'd played the accordion in the air-raid shelter and it had got rid of the rats. Apparently rats like violins and pianos but they can't stand the accordion ...
Jeanette Winterson
#59. There's a lot of peer pressure to not do positive stories out of Iraq ... I think there's a sense that the administration got a pass during the hot days of war and now that the war is over it's time to even out the deck somewhat.
Jerry Nachman
#60. The first Star Wars movie was one of six original stories I had written in the form of two trilogies. After the success of Star Wars, I added another trilogy. So now there are nine stories. The original two trilogies were concieved of as six films of which the first film was number four.
George Lucas
#61. I always wrote - not about war, necessarily, but I always wrote stories. I tried to write while I was in Iraq. It's not really - I didn't do a very good job, and not about war.
Phil Klay
#62. Bad things do happen in the world, like war, natural disasters, disease. But out of those situations always arise stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
Daryn Kagan
#63. When I take risks now, I do so only when I have to and with every precaution. I used to prospect for news, dropping into places to see what was up. Well, I could go to parts of Libya today and find lots of good stories, but I probably wouldn't be around to tell them.
Richard Engel
#64. George Lucas should have distributed the 'source code' to Star Wars. Millions of fans would create their own movies and stories. Most of them would be terrible, but a few would be genius.
Gabe Newell
#65. A personal story of the horrors that Poles lived through during World War II. When God Looked the Other Way, above all else, explains why there is still a Poland ... One of the most remarkable World War II sagas I have ever read. It is history with a human face.
Arnold Beichman
#66. My folks were busy. My dad was a teacher, and it was during the Second World War, and my mother was working. So I got my stories from films and books. I read a lot, and I love to read to this day.
Robert Osborne
#67. In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy.
Erich Fromm
#68. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe Oh.
Tim O'Brien
#69. I grew up listening in awe to stories of their wartime adventures. My granny, Joan, was a journalist and wrote amazing letters to my grandpa when he was a prisoner of war, while my nana, Mary, was a Land Girl, then a Wren. They were so independent, resilient and glamorous.
Laura Carmichael
#70. But this too is true: stories can save us.
Tim O'Brien
#71. Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.
Mitch Albom
#72. I know that I'm already in the history books and that people are going to remember me as the prisoner of war and the fabricated stories, but you know, to me I was just another soldier over there doing my job.
Jessica Lynch
#73. Sometimes a soldier returns home and all he can do is share his story in the hopes that somehow, in some way, it helps another soldier make sense of things. And although the stories may not be perfect, sometimes just sharing is enough to make a difference.
Michael Anthony
#74. The medals no-one will ever wear should be the ones that reflect the most. It's not an ending, it's not a period at the end of their lives, it's a semicolon. The story will continue to be told.
Jim Sheeler
#75. When men talk about war, the stories and terminology vary - it's this battle, these weapons, this terrain. But no matter where you go in the world, women use the same language to speak of war. They speak of fire, they speak of death, and they speak of starvation.
Abigail Disney
#76. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
Tim O'Brien
#77. The lucky ones, the ones who weren't here when the place was getting bombed to hell. We're not like these people. We shouldn't pretend we are. The stories these people have to tell, we're not entitled to them.
Khaled Hosseini
#78. Star Wars has always struck a chord with people. There are issues of loyalty, of friendship, of good and evil ... The theme came from stories and ideas that have been around for thousands of years.
George Lucas
#79. The rain still drummed on the roof, like fine needles striking the shingles. The family sat silently around the table, each one wrapped in their own thoughts.
It was Matthew's voice that broke the silence, asking, "And what happened after that?"
"After that," said Paul, "came Gettysburg.
Elisabeth Grace Foley
#80. And in a situation of war, we all experience it in much the same way, either as victim or perpetrator. So I'm not narrating a particular story. I'm just addressing experiences.
Doris Salcedo
#81. The worst stories usually make you think: 'but nobody had to die'.
These are called true stories.
Moonshine Noire
#82. Our passing interrupted the road crossing, and the crowd bunched on both sides waited for us to go by as we all waited for the war to go by, thinking we can suspend or postpone living and not knowing that in war the heart grows older than it does in dreams
Dan Davin
#83. Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum ... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind ... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle ...
Chinua Achebe
#84. 'The Chronicles of Narnia' are war-determined stories. I do not think Lewis could have written well or truthfully if he had tried to avoid the reality of war.
Stanley Hauerwas
#85. Only - only that, if you believe the tales, it's in the nature of our people to go to war and to kill, just as it is to sing and play and tell stories. Perhaps they are two halves of the same whole.
Juliet Marillier
#86. The US military still blames the media for stories and images that turned the American public against the war in Vietnam.
Bruce Jackson
#87. It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.
William Kittredge
#88. I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.
Antonio Tabucchi
#89. Because of empathy, stories of the suffering of one person could lead us into a war that could kill millions of people.
Paul Bloom
#90. After each of my books about the war has appeared, I thought it might be the last, but I've stopped saying that to myself. There are just too many stories left to tell - in fact, more all the time.
Tim O'Brien
#91. Even if this spring the dappled leaves should shelter our minds from the moon's pale echo we would still remember how once they were sheltered by our skulls only from the day's sun and the night's stars and never from what we feared and what we remembered
Dan Davin
#92. War all comes down to these little tiny stories about people's lives that will never be the same.
Eugene Richards
#93. The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible, and the most controversial. Instead of stories and moral teaching, it offers only visions - dreams and nightmares, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, earthquakes, plagues and war.
Elaine Pagels
#94. My dad was a big admirer of Sergeant York stories from the First World War.
Clint Eastwood
#95. In the '50s, a lot of stories were built around radiation and the proliferation of new technology. In the '70s, there were a lot of stories that dealt with the Vietnam War. So comic books have always been a reflection of the times we live in.
Jim Lee
#96. Exactly. The most convincing argument doesn't come from pithy sayings or aphorisms, but through stories. A clear line of causality, from one event to the next, that seems to be leading to an inevitable conclusion." "We are fighting our guerrilla war battle by battle.
Edward W. Robertson
#97. I can't quite remember the exact moment when I became obsessed with writing a play about the seemingly endless war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I knew that I wanted to somehow tell the stories of the Congolese women caught in the cross-fire.
Lynn Nottage
#98. If freedom is free and none need worry, then what blood drops for thee?
Ryan Goodrich
#99. The Veteran's History Project, a nationwide volunteer effort to collect oral histories from America's war veterans, provides an avenue to do just that. Now in its fifth year, the Project has collected more than 40,000 individual stories.
Spencer Bachus
#100. I've loved the "Star Wars" movies for the ride and pure fun and found that it just didn't stand up when asked for more, particularly when it comes to back stories, prequels, spin-offs, encyclopedic scope, etc.
Hank Stuever
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