...if that energy could have been channelled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.

How many times did someone have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?

All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it.

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.

What is the difference between the Marine Corps and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult leadership.

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

If war was hell and only hell and there were no other colors in the palate I don't think people would continue to make war.

You can still see the shadow from when the Zeppelin floated over America; it took like Islam in the desert . . .

Every time I had a vision of myself lying dead somewhere, it was up there, in the Highlands.

Maybe nothing's so unfunny as an omen read wrong.

We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.

She's in the Catskill, " Shopie began, but Scathach reached over and pinched her hand. "

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

There are real people behind the [Bible] stories.

For violence, like Achilles' lance, can heal the wounds it has inflicted.

That's the past for you. Not only does it come back at the most unexpected, and inconvenient, times but it's set in stone.

I'd rather live in Bohemia than in any other land.

When you add just a little bit [of Tabasco] at the end, what you taste is the spectrum between the cooked chile flavor and the kind of nearly raw, just kind of fermented chile flavor at the end.

Life grows lovely where you are.

Be like a tree in pursuit of your cause. Stand firm, grip hard, thrust upward. Bend to the winds of heaven. And learn tranquility.

Men do not mirror themselves in running water - they mirror themselves in still water. Only what is still can still the stillness of other things.