H.P. Oliver Quotes

I never considered myself a fall guy. I know what I did. I know why I did it. I'm not ashamed of it.

It's one thing to say don't commit atrocities on the battlefield. It's another thing to say don't get caught doing atrocities.

I think as a rifle platoon and company commander your view is about 1,000 meters in front of you and you hope you can cover that ground and not have to back up and give it up again.

Bill Clinton is not my Commander in Chief.

As a Marine officer in combat, I was responsible for the lives and safety of all the Marines who served with me.

Our Garrick 's a salad; for in him we see Oil, vinegar, sugar, and saltness agree!

Things take the time they take. don't worry. How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?

The world is like a vast sea: mankind like a vessel sailing on its tempestuous bosom. ... [T]he sciences serve us for oars.

Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society

What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?

I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.

Also I wanted to be able to love And we all know how that one goes, don't we? Slowly

In the glare of your mind, be modest. And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.

Snapshots, moments, mere seconds: as fragile and beautiful and hopeless as a single butterfly, flapping on against a gathering wind.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?

Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.

So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.

Look, hasn't my body already felt like the body of a flower?

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me

Lindsay calls them the Pugs: pretty from far away, ugly up close.

This is what happens when you try to help people. You get screwed.

How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all?

Perfection is a promise, and a reassurance that we are not wrong.

Anger is useful only to a certain point. After that, it becomes rage, and rage will make you careless.

A kiss is a course of procedure cunningly devised, for the mutual stopage of speech at a moment when words are superfluous.

President Reagan didn't always know what he knew.

Blood relatives often have nothing to do with family, and similarly, family is about who you choose to make your life with.

I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa

If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love.

I'm probably a bit romantic about it, but I think we humans miss having contact with fire. We need it.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

This is what I want. This is the only thing I've ever wanted. Everything else—every single second of every single day that has come before this very moment, this kiss—has meant nothing.

The very pink of perfection.

I will come out with my interpretation. If I'm wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.

Pity and friendship are two passions incompatible with each other.

Just because the Americans are so good at rattling out accessible and cheap junk food, nobody looks twice when it comes to their food. But there are golden nuggets everywhere.

All that a husband or wife really wants is to be pitied a little, praised a little, and appreciated a little.

Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.

How blest is he who crowns in shades like these A youth of labour with an age of ease!

He watched and wept and prayed and felt for all

If the soul be happily disposed, every thing becomes capable of affording entertainment, and distress will almost want a name.

But winter lingering chills the lap of May.

Well had the boding tremblers learned to trace the day's disasters in his morning face.

As for disappointing them I should not so much mind; but I can't abide to disappoint myself.

The jests of the rich are ever successful.

This is the strange way of the world, that people who simply want to love are instead forced to become warriors.