Top 100 War Story Quotes
#1. If you're going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it's sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.
George R R Martin
#2. In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.
Tim O'Brien
#3. I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I'm the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage.
Gillian Flynn
#4. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.
Tim O'Brien
#5. I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.
Tim O'Brien
#6. 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
#7. The greatest war story ever told commemorates a war that established no boundaries, won no territory, and furthered no cause.
Caroline Alexander
#8. I enjoyed Old Man's War immensely. A space war story with fast action, vivid characters, moral complexity and cool speculative physics, set in a future you almost want to live into, and a universe you sincerely hope you don't live in already.
Ken MacLeod
#9. You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.
Tim O'Brien
#10. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe Oh.
Tim O'Brien
#11. I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.
Kurt Vonnegut
#13. The novel 'World War Z' is told from the perspectives of so many people - speaking to the narrator - that there's no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film.
Annalee Newitz
#14. It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war.
Chang-rae Lee
#15. I think it's a lot easier to tell a war story about two sides of a conflict with one another as opposed to one side in conflict with itself.
Christopher McQuarrie
#16. The story of FDR as U.S. Commander in Chief is a heroic war story of a president who had already overcome great adversity in facing polio but who went on to take the reins of our armed forces in the greatest conflagration in human history - on our behalf.
Nigel Hamilton
#17. Would you believe in a story without the heroes? There are stories without heroes.
Pushpa Rana
#18. Truth has a resonance to it that fills the cracks where falsehoods lie.
Rick DeStefanis
#19. It was 1981. I was working on a novel. And I put that novel aside one day after I read a newspaper article. The story said there were 19 women still on the pension payroll who were Confederate war widows. They were women who very early in their lives had married very old men.
Allan Gurganus
#20. Well, when Kathy Kennedy, who is the president of Lucasfilm, came to me to ask if I'd be interested in working on this "Star Wars" movie, we talked about a young woman at the center of the story from the outset. And it was something that was always an important part of this movie.
J.J. Abrams
#21. The United States came within a whisker of invading Utah in 1858 and starting a civil war three years before the Civil War. Because the conflict ended up fizzling out, it's not the most dramatic story about the West.
David Roberts
#22. It is the untold story of this war and it is the story of every war ever fought. Greedy men seeing someone weaker with something they want.
C.C. Humphreys
#23. By interviewing at least one veteran, you can preserve memories that otherwise might be lost. My uncle was a downed fighter pilot and P.O.W. in World War II, and I am looking forward to recording his story for inclusion in the project.
Spencer Bachus
#24. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.
Tim O'Brien
#25. It's important for little girls to know not every story has to be a love story and for boys to know that soldiers aren't the only ones to triumph in war.
Guillermo Del Toro
#26. 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
#27. People like to come up to me and tell me that I've got nice ink. Except these tattoos aren't just decorations. They are declarations. Every tattoo I have tells its own story about who I am. Drug-free. Honor. And a war against the system.
CM Punk
#28. It should therefore be difficult in a republic to declare war; but not to make peace.
Joseph Story
#29. Demond's family history wasn't so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?
Jesmyn Ward
#30. We know the story of the Deluge from the Holy Scripture. Why did the first race of men come to such a tragic end? Because they had abandoned God and must die, guilty and innocent alike. They had only themselves to blame for their punishment. And it is the same today.
Wilm Hosenfeld
#31. I was appraising . . . not eye fooking.
Paul Allor
#32. 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
#33. Patrick: America is at war with an Afghan tribe...[?]
David: Yeah, it's a, uh, long story.
A.G. Riddle
#34. The point is the love story. We live in a love story in the midst of war.
John Eldredge
#35. Much of the blame is the malarkey that artists have created to glorify war, which as we all know, is nonsense, and a good deal worse than that - romantic pictures of battle, and of the dead and men in uniform and all that. And I did not want to have that story told again.
Kurt Vonnegut
#36. Every story - love or war - is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right.
Sarah Blake
#37. History books are filled with lies. Whoever wins the war tells the story.
Stephanie Perkins
#38. Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony; I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you've never heard it.
Michael Herr
#39. My job is to put words together and tell a story. If that doesn't work for you, it's not a war crime.
Alan Zweibel
#40. This is a story of Africa. A pioneer woman's journey north was merely the beginning.
Jeffrey Whittam
#41. I was researching a different World War II story when I came across an article in the 'Chicago Tribune' from June 1945 that knocked me for a loop. The article explained that a military plane had crashed in an impossibly remote valley of New Guinea that had been nicknamed Shangri-La.
Mitchell Zuckoff
#42. Maybe the next three Star Wars movies will tell the story of how the last three Star Wars movies got so shitty.
Dana Gould
#43. Since September 11, it seems to me that never in our lifetime, except possibly in the early stages of World War II, has it been clearer that we have as a source of strength, a source of direction, a source of inspiration - our story.
David McCullough
#44. At times the engine stopped, and grown-ups and children climbed out of the carriages with tins to collect water from the engine steam pipes. This was the only drinking water that we had access to, and though it was hot and very rusty, it was the best drink I felt I'd ever had.
Alfred Nestor
#45. In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
Umberto Eco
#46. The U.S. Army records alone for World War II weigh 17,000 tons, and even the best historians have not done more than just scratch the surface. The story is such that 500 years from now people will be writing and reading about it.
Rick Atkinson
#47. [2015] it's a time that there's a clash of ideologies, similar to the Cold War. I think that a story like this has been waiting to be told, and I think it's a fresh look at the whole earth-shattering business of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Steven Knight
#48. But the participants [in war] never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value.
James Lee Burke
#49. When I was a kid, my favorite movies were the George Pal version of 'War Of The Worlds,' 'Them,' and 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' Those movies were scary! They haunted my nightmares for years, so when I started writing, I wanted to write a story that was just as big and just as scary.
David Gerrold
#50. All family stories are important, just as all people are important, and they deserve to be passed along.
Karen Chamberlain
#51. 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
#52. Handing me a pen is like handy a madman a knife ... at the end of it you know you'll end up with a lot of broken bones, blood, and bodies - but it'll be one hell of a story to tell your friends.
D.E.M. Emrys
#53. 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
#54. One of the main reasons I wanted to work on 'World War Z' was because I'm a huge fan of the book, and I love the idea of taking a non-linear story and creating a three-act structure out of it.
Marc Forster
#55. The bones of the story of 'War Horse' is a love story. That's what makes it universal.
Steven Spielberg
#56. Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading.
Will Eisner
#57. 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
#58. God permits war in order that men may bear the consequences of their sins as punishment. How clearly this is shown time and time again in the story of the children of Israel!
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
#59. I can't measure up to Homer. His composition has survived for nearly three millennia and remains the world's most beautiful and mournful depiction of war. But the story of the Trojan War does not belong to Homer. The characters he employs were legendary long before he was born.
David Benioff
#60. I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.
Joe Haldeman
#61. With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.
Mira Nair
#62. There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.
Kurt Vonnegut
#63. It was said by Abraham Lincoln that Ms. Stowe's novel, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, started the great civil war, the it can be said with certainty that Ms. Brown's novel THE SOUTHERN CROSS reveals the untold story behind the Civil Rights Movement." John Jeter
Alabama Jane Brown
#64. Migration is the story of my life: my parents and grandparents journeyed across four continents to flee war and find jobs, eventually finding their way to the U.S.
Leila Janah
#65. No American can read the story of the part America took in the war without experiencing a glow of patriotic feeling. Every Allied nation can say the same thing.
Kelly Miller
#66. 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
#67. I think the language of sacrifice is particularly important for societies like the United States in which war remains our most determinative common experience, because states like the United States depend on the story of our wars for our ability to narrate our history as a unified story.
Stanley Hauerwas
#68. Telling my story was supposed to be a good thing but it had just made everything worse.
Sara Novic
#69. History is a raw onion sandwich, it just repeats, it burps. We've seen it again and again this year. Same old story, Same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment
Julian Barnes
#70. I'm not a World War II buff. I know a little bit about it, I was taught the other side of the story in school, so it was unfamiliar to me, the idea of a German resistance, and yet it was considerable.
Bill Nighy
#71. 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
#72. A compelling and important story of First Word War Scotland, a time when women redefined the word hope as the world was losing its innocence. Andrea MacPherson writes beautifully, balancing the lives of her characters between history and the poetry of gesture, secrets and love.
Ami McKay
#73. WWI is a romantic war, in all senses of the word. An entire generation of men and women left the comforts of Edwardian life to travel bravely, and sometimes even jauntily, to almost certain death. At the very least, any story or novel about WWI is about innocence shattered in the face of experience.
Anita Shreve
#74. In the war room, love? What if someone comes in?"
I stood and removed his shirt. "Then they'll have a good story to tell."
"Good?" He adopted the pretense of being offended.
"Prove me wrong.
Maria V. Snyder
#75. First-person narrators can't die, so as long as we keep telling the story of our own lives we're safe. Ha bloody fucking Ha.
Pat Barker
#76. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.
Winston S. Churchill
#77. 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
#78. This is a story of a period between two World Wars - an interim in which insanity cut loose. Liberty took a nose dive, and humanity was kicked around somewhat.
Charlie Chaplin
#79. 'The Art Student's War' is, at its core, a traditional American wartime love story. As such, it is timely and engrossing. By the end, all its principal characters 'have been to Hell and back.'
Floyd Skloot
#80. Finally, I will forever be grateful to W. Mark Felt. It was a tug-of-war at times, but he came through, providing the kind of guidance, information and understanding that were essential to the Watergate story.
Bob Woodward
#81. It may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a state in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.
Winston Churchill
#82. If you've got a camera, go to a war zone and tell a story.
Rhys Ifans
#83. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
C.S. Lewis
#85. 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
#86. Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story
the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.
Hugh Howey
#87. Some of the inspirations I had as far as following that story would be, like, say, "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly," the way they use the Civil War in that, or even the idea that - the movie that Leone was going to do before he died was going to be a movie about the battle of Stalingrad.
Quentin Tarantino
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending.
Winston Churchill
#91. There is a story, no doubt apocryphal, that gamers at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, have many times replayed the 1942 Battle of Midway - but have never been able to produce an American victory.
Robert Cowley
#92. He read reports, examined evidence, and poured more reports up the chain than the Pentagon could read. Nothing short of a human sieve. But in the end he was just one small piece on this game board called war. End of story
Ted Dekker
#93. "A Tale of Three Cities" is a tribute to our parents' generation, who escaped from city to city in search of their loved ones and in search of a place to build a better home. The story is set during the turbulent war years in China in the '40s and '50s.
Mabel Cheung
#94. Basically all the religions,sciences and powers of the world boil down to a simple truth. The Best Story Teller will win in the end!
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#95. It is important also to consider, that the surest means of avoiding war is to be prepared for it in peace.
Joseph Story
#96. An apocryphal story recounts the dilhemma of a man during the Civil War who could not decide whether to join the Confederate or Union forces. Finally he put on a gray coat and blue pants, and both sides shot him.
John Frohnmayer
#97. Angels, demons, sex. Heaven, hell, war. Blood and royalty, history and magic, fire and ice. And a story you cannot put down. This is fantasy at its best.
Stephen Graham Jones
#98. I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.
David Benioff
#99. The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story.
Tim O'Brien
#100. Iwo Jima had become the number-one front-page story in newspapers across the country. And it had become the most heavily covered, written-about battle in World War II.
James D. Bradley
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