“The Confederacy was not just a separatist movement, it was an existential threat to the very idea of freedom, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—it could not be abided, and that conflict left so many dead that the streets of Gettysburg were once littered with so many corpses that it was weeks getting them into the mass graves. The town was covered in the rotting dead and the stench of them, all lying underneath the Pennsylvania sun. . . . a town where, once the armies moved on to fight again elsewhere, there weren’t enough people left alive to wash the blood from the streets and the gore from the walls—that’s what civil war means.” – Noah Caldwell-Gervais, The Lincoln Highway: Across America on the First Transcontinental Motor Route (emphasis in original)
Category: Lit & Crit
“He farting from the bathroom, she farting from the bedroom, like two mooses calling in the night.” – Lydia Davis, “May, Excerpts from a Journal, January to June, 1997 ”
“Sometimes I’m grateful that no one uses my washcloth. And that I can go to the store and buy brand new sponges at any time . . .” – Lydia Davis, “March, Excerpts from a Journal, January to June, 1997 ” (ellipsis and emphasis in original)
“1 B-17, upon an alleged submarine sighting, drops 4 depth charges and 1 bomb whereupon a whale breaks water. Weather cancels other missions.” – Eleventh Air Force Operations, January 30, 1943, U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, Combat Chronology (compiled by Kit C. Carter & Robert Mueller)
“Ambition and the blessed simplicities of action don’t always quarter in comfort.” – Regina Corrado and Ted Mann, “True Colors,” Deadwood
“To work for crumbs or to keep from the lash says maybe a slave’s what you are.” – David Milch and Regina Corrado, “I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For,” Deadwood
“Change ain’t lookin’ for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to.” – David Milch and Regina Corrado, “I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For,” Deadwood
“No nation is rich enough or productive enough to supply and maintain battlefronts where there is no longer a battle.” – War Department “Reports on Overseas Construction” (quoted by Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy: 1940-1943)
“Luke’s description in Acts of the early church’s communism of goods in Jerusalem is one that good Christians have striven heroically for the better part of two millennia to pretend not to notice.” – David Bentley Hart, “Notes on Authorship,” The New Testament: A Translation
“Pain or damage don’t end the world, or despair, or fucking beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man, and give some back.” – Jody Worth, “E. B. Was Left Out,” Deadwood
“The Creator, in His infinite wisdom, salted His works so that where gold was, there also you’d find rumor. Though He decreed just as firm that the opposite wouldn’t always hold.” – Ted Mann, “Requiem for a Gleet,” Deadwood
“Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh.” – Ted Mann, “Sold Under Sin,” Deadwood
“I mean, you—you gotta behave like a grown fuckin’ man, huh? You gotta shut the fuck up. Don’t be sorry, don’t look fuckin’ back, because . . . believe me, no one gives a fuck.” – Ricky Jay, “Jewel’s Boot Is Made for Walking,” Deadwood
“As a base of operations, you cannot beat a fuckin’ saloon.” – Malcolm MacRury, “Plague,” Deadwood
“During the first nineteen months of its participation in World War II, the U.S. Army purchased almost 950,000 trucks, nineteen times the number it had procured during the corresponding period of World War I. From Pearl Harbor to V-J Day it procured for its own and Allied forces some 84,000 tanks, 2.2 million trucks, 6.2 million rifles, 350,000 artillery pieces, .5 billion rounds of ground artillery ammunition, 41 billion rounds of small arms ammunition. It shipped overseas 127 million measurement tons of cargo, and 7.3 million troops and other passengers.” – Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy: 1940-1943
“It is better and cheaper to have a strong Army and not need it than it is to need a strong Army and not have it.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“Any politician should be put in jail who votes for an appropriation bill and fails to vote the tax to pay for it.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“I can see it in a vision. It comes to haunt me at night. I am standing there knee deep in the water and all around me as far as the eye can see are dead men, floating like a school of dynamited fish. They are all floating face up with their eyes wide open and their skins a ghastly white. They are looking at me as they float by and they are saying, ‘Patton, you bastard, it’s your fault. You did this to me. You killed me.’” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“The early Christians were (in the strictly technical sense) communists, as the book of Acts quite explicitly states. If these are indeed the Last Days, as James says—if everything is now seen in the light of final judgment—then storing up possessions for ourselves is the height of imprudence. And I imagine this is also why subsequent generations of Christians have not, as a rule, been communists: the Last Days are in fact taking quite some time to elapse, and we have families to raise in the meantime.” – Richard Bentley Hart, “Introduction” to The New Testament: A Translation (emphasis in original)
“‘Knowledge is power,’ but to a degree only. Its possession per se will raise a man to mediocrity, but not to distinction.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., “The Secret of Victory”
“The quickest way to get to heaven is to advance across open ground swept by effective enemy anti-tank fire.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., “Use of Armored Formations, Letter of Instruction No. 3, 20 May 1944 ”
“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.” – attributed to Valery Legasov, in Chernobyl, by Craig Mazin
“Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write.” – Sir Philip Sidney, “Astrophil and Stella”
“Memoir is literature and literature is art and in art you must seek to illuminate something.” – Jo Ann Beard (interviewed by Susan Lerner in Booth 19)
“The trouble with English speakers was that they always made you wait for the noun.” – Rachel Salguero Kowalsky, “The Delivery Boy”
“Childlike creativity is wonderful because it knows no boundaries and borders. As we grow older, we acquire boundaries and borders, rules and etiquette, concepts regarding what we shouldn’t say or do. That’s useful, obviously, but it can kill creativity, you know? And creativity, I think, is partly about seeing the world without any kind of limitation.” – Viet Thanh Nguyen (interviewed by Jennifer Delgado in Booth 19)
“I think most kids are naturally creative—it’s life that beats the creativity out of people.” – Viet Thanh Nguyen (interviewed by Jennifer Delgado in Booth 19)
“Well, I stared into the abyss, as they say, and the abyss stared back into me. Then it got bored and left. So here I am!” – Paul Lamb, Parent Imperfect
“We are pathologically linguistic. We chop the world up into propositions and, if we’re not careful, examine those rather than the world itself.” – Charles Foster, “The Soliloquies of the Lambs”
“Marriage is not to be undertaken frivolously; it requires a mature, fully developed dependency and a vast capacity for endurance.” – Valerie Solanas, “Up You Ass”