Top 100 War Fiction Quotes
#1. There is a lot of evidence to back up the assertion that war fiction takes time. Many all-time classics of the genre, from Erich Maria Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front' to Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' to Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried,' took over a decade to pen.
Matt Gallagher
#2. I've read pretty broadly on the Holocaust - both fiction and non-fiction - and to me, 'The Lost Wife' is one of the best. The horrors of war serve as a backdrop to a love affair that spans a lifetime, and that love story stayed with me long after I put down the book.
Lauren Weisberger
#3. It's like how science fiction in the '50s was a way of talking about war without actually having to risk any political capital. The obvious metaphor is power and powerlessness, but I also think it's a way of experimenting with dangerous feelings in a safe arena and trying things out.
Margaret Stohl
#4. Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist.
Max Brooks
#6. Food's the killer. The clock starts as soon as the troops are on the ground. You wouldn't believe how fast they consume what they're carrying, and then ... if I don't get them more, if I don't find them more ... they die.
Henry V. O'Neil
#7. 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
#8. God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning.
Surely, while we live we are not lost.
Oh Janos, Janos my brother!
Surely we are not lost
while we live.
John Hepworth
#9. Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm.
Sarah Moss
#10. I just can't comprehend, that you, Borge, of all people, couldn't keep your mouth shut.
Steen Langstrup
#11. You help us, they'll lock you up for the rest of your life.
Henry V. O'Neil
#12. Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.
Ulysses S. Grant
#13. We saved the lives of a whole family that night. Children, parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, all sailed to safety in Sweden inside a little fisherman's boat."
Johannes aka 'BB'
The Informer by Steen Langstrup
Steen Langstrup
#14. She turned her painted blue eyes toward the assistant and said something in French before she left.
Nancy B. Brewer
#15. Remember Ping-fa, Sun Tzu,' Art of War - read between the lines: kick ass and take names later."
Mad
Stargirl
Linden Morningstar
#16. I am German, yes, but I am not a Nazi. There is a difference, and one day I hope you understand that.
Caroline Leech
#17. Henry,that's how you get rid of fleas. You keep them from laying eggs. You go to war with them.
Jason Jack Miller
#18. We want to know. We want to know who we are and what we are capable of.
I want to know.
And yet we were dragged into another war. Another seemingly inevitable and gruesome legacy passed down, along with soma.
Jeno Marz
#19. So why had he come? He'd said he'd had no choice, but for centuries men had chopped off their own limbs, faked insanity, gone into hiding or to prison rather than to war. Was there some dark flaw in his psyche? Did he have some perverse need to destroy? To kill?
Dominique Wilson
#20. How many remember where they were when the war began on the 1st of September 1939?
I remember.
I should remember.
I started it.
My name is Robert Leroy Parker.
Daniel DeLacy
#21. Dare I ask Mao and his Communist Party?
I fear my throat will be cut into two pieces.
In the name of revolution, for thought crimes,
Such questions can turn me to ashes.
Zoe S. Roy
#22. They would never forget the war. The world wouldn't let them, and neither would history.
Lee Strauss
#23. Once upon a time there was war, and starvation, and death. Once upon a time we would kill our brothers and sisters, fearing for our own lives. Once upon a time the characters turned from us, and we wept. Now we do not war, nor do we fear, nor do we weep. We Redact.
F.D. Lee
#24. I am afraid, my dear niece, that a 'mere woman' is something you most certainly are not.
Katlyn Charlesworth
#25. As their figures recede, it strikes Filsan as ironic that they had delayed fleeing so they could take as many of their possessions as possible, but now those very possessions prevent their flight.
Nadifa Mohamed
#26. He led her back to the house, the perfume from the acacia clinging to her. The djinn was supposed to live in the scent of the acacia blossom, making themselves visible only to the young in order to entrap them in otherworldly world.
Nadeem Aslam
#27. Brains will always conquer brawn, in the end. The soldiers can flex their muscles all they want, but the well-thought-out tactics of the generals are what win the war.
Patrick Hall
#28. She raised her head and saw a squadron of fighter planes. She stretched her hand high as if she could grab hold and climb away from what she had done, from who she was.
Sarah Sundin
#29. When he shows I'll say: 'Good day, a bouquet for Mr. Hovgaard.' Then you shoot him. Understood?"
Ingrid aka 'Alis K'
The Informer
Steen Langstrup
#31. The line between him and the enemy had simultaneously blurred and solidified. Somehow, while perhaps it shouldn't have, this thought provided a strange sense of peace.
Kristina McMorris
#32. Peggy is a sovereign nation. She governs herself and those around her by her own laws.
Katlyn Charlesworth
#34. Tolerance over time breeds resentment. Only through understanding, that comes from the acceptance of one another's differences, shall we find true peace.
Erndell Scott
#35. One's child is always one's child no matter what age they might be. You worry when your child makes a noise, when he doesn't. It's a terrible kind of love. Terrible.
Chris Womersley
#36. Le Carre's voice - patrician, cold, brilliant and amused - was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction.
Alan Furst
#38. He threw his burning cigarette onto our clean living room floor and ground it into the wood with his boot.
We were about to become cigarettes.
Ruta Sepetys
#39. In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality.
Steve Erickson
#40. All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction.
Javier Cercas
#41. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
Fill'd with death, ya pens'll hang ya.
Ron A Swan
#42. We don't tend to write about disease in fiction - not just teen novels but all American novels - because it doesn't fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle.
John Green
#43. (The golden goose has died, my prince turned into a frog, the Kingdom is lost, everyone has turned into stone and I am locked in the tower)
Nancy B. Brewer
#44. I've got to think of a hundred and sixty million Americans, not of the three or four that happen to be the ones I love. And it wouldn't be a big thing - security is built on lots of little thing. I don't like to talk about it. (Calhoun Hightower in Danger for Breakfast)
John McPartland
#45. I've had a lot of lieutenants over the years, and all the good ones were sick, sick individuals. You might be the best one yet.
Henry V. O'Neil
#46. Greatness, Master, is generally only considered enough if you are the greatest.
Jessica O'Toole
#47. Gentlemen. You are looking at the true Abraham Lincoln of Arabia. And in order to end our internal bickering - our civil war, if you will - I have solicited your aid.
Leonard Leventon
#48. I'm afraid we were so eager to avoid war, we've made it all but certain.
Brent Weeks
#49. The land will sink into the water, and then, the water will evaporate into the air, taking the sky with it. And all, but a tremor of what once was, will be gone. ~ Ichabod Everward, during the Fossil War.
Ryan Mark
#50. In her orchard the trees had been born from deaths; they marked and grew from the remains of the children that had passed through her.
Nadifa Mohamed
#51. Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are missed, her dreams seem to say.
Nadifa Mohamed
#52. When I wrote War Against the Mafia as a Vietnam statement, I didn't expect much to come of it-but quite a bit came and it captured me. I continued the books to feed the obvious hunger that was there for heroic fiction.
Don Pendleton
#53. War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as 'The Battle of Dorking' from 1871 showed how SF's trademark 'what if' scenarios could easily encompass warfare.
Paul Di Filippo
#54. I grew up a really nerdy kid. I read science fiction and fantasy voraciously, for the first 16 years of my life. I read a lot of classic Cold War science fiction, which is much of the best science fiction, so I speak the language well, which is a commodity that's not easy to come by in Hollywood.
Jon Spaihts
#56. When you want something, all the Universe conspires to helping you achieve it.
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Just ask..
Victoria Aldridge Washuk
#57. Because one kingdom goes to war with another, it does not mean all citizens of that kingdom agree with it. It is not always they have a choice.
Patrick Hall
#58. 'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real ... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.
Tim O'Brien
#59. Am Anfang war Gott? It may have been true, but it was not germane.
Stephen Craig
#60. A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.
Dylan Moran
#61. War's all either country knows, and everything seems to depend on it now.
Samuel Snoek-Brown
#62. Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.
Nadeem Aslam
#63. Don't know when my life came to visualising intense pain and tragedy to putting it down on paper, to putting across a message of love in times of abject hate. Thank you everybody and the conspiracy of the stars for showing me this day. To many, many more books, inshallah, and to many more launches.
Simran Keshwani
#64. I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.
Kenneth Koch
#65. There are criminals everywhere these days, you know. One might end up missing the police! Who would have thought that possible?
The Maid
The Informer by Steen Langtrup
Steen Langstrup
#66. The times are so peculiar now, so mediaeval so unreasonable that for the first time in a hundred years truth is really stranger than fiction. Any truth.
Gertrude Stein
#67. If there was anything the last year had taught her - if there was anything Caleb had taught her, the Metigen War had taught her - it was that perspective was everything.
If you wanted to understand your enemy, you must understand that they were the hero in their own story.
G.S. Jennsen
#68. It was not an unusual site to see Negro tenant farmers crossing the intersection of Spring and Barbrick on the way to the cotton warehouse
Nancy B. Brewer
#69. The Baptist Church rejects man with wooden leg: It appears the Baptist preacher refused to baptize a veteran of the late war in the holy water- saying they only baptize flesh and blood, not wood.
Nancy B. Brewer
#70. Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can't feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is beautiful.
Elizabeth Wein
#71. Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths - until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
Vladimir Nabokov
#72. She did not realise that there could be a joy - a spiritual ecstasy- in the touch of a certain man, or that she would long for his touch with all her being
Anne Rouen
#73. Today's breakfast consist of rice and a piece of bread fried in a bit of salt pork grease. At least I have my memories of grand banquets and fine foods, but this is all the children have ever known. I suppose it is best not to have anything to compare.
Nancy B. Brewer
#74. It was easy to imagine the beginning of time here, but also, perhaps, its end.
Chris Womersley
#75. Rebel Number Four" is waiting patiently by the door. I named him "Rebel Number Four," for he is the fourth of his kind I have given the name "Rebel." To many he may be just a hound dog, but to me he is a champion and a friend to the end.
Nancy B. Brewer
#76. Truth has a resonance to it that fills the cracks where falsehoods lie.
Rick DeStefanis
#77. Like the magnolia tree,
She bends with the wind,
Trials and tribulation may weather her,
Yet, after the storm her beauty blooms,
See her standing there, like steel,
With her roots forever buried,
Deep in her Southern soil.
Nancy B. Brewer
#78. To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game ... speak the truth and hear the truth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#80. Sneaking out at night. You think you're so clever, but you're not. Either you're a saboteur, Johannes, or you've got a mistress.
The Reverend's wife, Grete
The Informer
Steen Langstrup
#81. I get offered a lot of science fiction work and there is a new project in the pipeline called Master Race, set in World War II, but that's a little way off yet.
Jeremy Bulloch
#82. To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss.
Chris Womersley
#83. Shitting fucking bastard! Fuck off you massive cockwank!' - Misty Meanor, during a particularly stressful encounter.
Matthew Sylvester
#84. Sonetimes the hardest person to forgive is yourself.
Sarah Sundin
#85. You'll be very close to him when you shoot him. So shove the pistol in his face and pull the trigger instantly."
Ingrid aka 'Alis K'
The Informer
Steen Langstrup
#86. The Captain, so close as he was, didn't warrant their attention. Even a fly on a horse's hindquarters gets a tail whip. And that is the thick of it. We are less than flies to these foul foes.
Greever Williams
#87. And thus Bacchus turned Phyllis into his slave. She had become the lovely slave girl, Briseis, whom Achilles took as a war prize & whom Achilles had to yield to Agamemnon, his boss. Just as Phyllis was the prize that Eros found & whom Eros had to yield to Bacchus,his boss.[MMT]
Nicholas Chong
#88. Sea and land may lie between us, but my heart is always there with you.
Nancy B. Brewer
#90. In seven days God had created the Earth. In a single day mankind had turned it upside down.
Kristina McMorris
#91. I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.
Andre Dubus
#93. All I am, and all I love, is war. I don't know who I will be if I stop. The world, if it is to survive, needs a leader, not a warmonger. The world I want to make does not require me
Kameron Hurley
#94. This is a story of Africa. A pioneer woman's journey north was merely the beginning.
Jeffrey Whittam
#95. It is remarkable that Lord Esher should be so much astray ... We must conclude that an uncontrollable fondness for fiction forbade him to forsake it for fact. Such constancy is a defect in an historian.
Winston Churchill
#97. On this night of the Harvest Moon. They tossed bones into the "Bone Fire" and asked the yellow moon to shine its protection over them. (Today we call it a "Bonfire")
Nancy B. Brewer
#98. The Republicans here in Concord and down in Washington D.C. would have us believe that the War on Women is a phony war. Michele Bachmann and Fox News would have us believe that the whole thing is 'political fiction.'
Ann McLane Kuster
#99. The porcelain doll residing in her white-pillared dollhouse was a mirage.
Katlyn Charlesworth
#100. War was easy. The hard part was cleaning up afterward.
Evan Meekins
