And so everything is new and brave, red poppies and good food, cigarettes and summer breeze.

The things men did or felt they had to do.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

Our knowledge of life is limited to death

The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.

For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress -- to the future.

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

We don't act like that because we are in good humor we are in a good humor because otherwise we should go to pieces.

We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.

The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.

And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death.

The bell seemed to have set off analarm in my brain, and I glimpsed at the mysterious envelope on my desk.There was another item I should’ve gotten from my single-shoe salesman.

Elise Vasquez and I stand shoulder to shoulder, watching the woman we both feel we lost, and may be never really had.

Worrying that banning flag desecration would inhibit free speech reveals a misunderstanding of the flag's fundamental nature.

Rich Mullins was the uneasy conscience of Christian music. He didn't live like a star. He'd taken a vow of poverty so that what he earned could be used to help others.

Doubts are like stains on a shirt. I like shirts with stains, because when I'm given a shirt that's too clean, one that's completely white, I immediately start having doubts.

Everybody's got a right to be a sucker ... once.

I think my very earliest stories were all intellectual exercises and I was writing from experiences I had never had about characters who were about an inch deep.

Jesus Christ is, in the noblest and most perfect sense, the realized ideal of humanity.

Democracy is an impossible thing until the power is shared by all, but let not democracy degenerate into mobocracy.

So what if I'm smokin' weed onstage and doing what I gotta do? It's not me shooting nobody, stabbing nobody, killing nobody. It'sa peaceful gesture and they have to respect that and appreciate that.