Michael Shaara

There's nothing so much like a god on earth as a General on a battlefield.

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.

Why do there have to be men like that, men who enjoy another man's dying?

Southern women like their men religious and a little mad.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?