“Treat men like brutes and they will become like brutes, but you treat them worse than brutes and there is no telling what they will become.” – Wilbur Fisk, Hard Marching Every Day (eds. E. and R. Rosenblatt)
“If a man wants to know what it is to have every bone in his body ache with fatigue, every muscle sore and exhausted, and his whole body ready to sink to the ground, let him diet on a common soldier’s fare till he has only the strength that imparts, and then let him shoulder his knapsack, haversack, gun and equipments, and make one of our forced marches, and I will warrant him to be satisfied that the duties of war are stern and severe, whether we march or face the enemy on the field of battle. A fellow feels very much like grumbling at such times as that, and when we march on and on, expecting every minute to halt but still hurrying forward, when every spark of energy seems about to be extinguished, and the last remnant of strength gone, tired, hungry, sick and sore, who blames a soldier if he finds it hard work to suppress thoughts of a quiet home he has left behind him, with its comforts and endearments, and if he sometimes turns his thoughts to himself and wonders if he, as an individual, will ever be compensated for the sacrifice he is making. What if the rebels are whipped, and what if they are not? How does it matter to him? One blunder of General Grant’s may make final victory forever impossible and all our lost toil go for nothing. I tell you some of our hard marches put one’s patriotism severely to the test. It finds out a fellow’s weak points if he has got any, and we don’t claim to be without them.” – Wilbur Fisk, Hard Marching Every Day (eds. E. and R. Rosenblatt)
“The most singular and obstinate fighting that I have seen during the war, or ever heard or dreamed of in my life, was the fight last Thursday. Hancock had charged and driven the enemy from their breastworks, and from their camps, but the enemy rallied and regained all but the first line of works, and in one place they got a portion of that. The rebels were on one side of the breastwork, and we on the other. We could touch their guns with ours. They would load, jump up and fire into us, and we did the same to them. Almost every shot that was made took effect. Some of our boys would jump clear up on to the breastworks and fire, then down, reload and fire again, until they were themselves picked off. If ancient or modern history contains instances of more determined bravery than was shown there, I can hardly conceive in what way it could have been exhibited. This firing was kept up all day, and till five o’clock next morning, when the enemy retreated. Gen. Russell remarked that it was a regular bull-dog fight; he never saw anything like it before. I visited the place the next morning, and though I have seen horrid scenes since this war commenced, I never saw anything half so bad as that. Our men lay piled one top of another, nearly all shot through the head. There were many among them that I knew well, five from my own company. On the rebel side it was worse than on ours. In some places the men were piled four or five deep, some of whom were still alive. I turned away from that place, glad to escape from such a terrible, sickening sight. I have sometimes hoped, that if I must die while I am a soldier, I should prefer to die on the battle-field, but after looking at such a scene, one cannot help turning away and saying, Any death but that.” – Wilbur Fisk, Hard Marching Every Day (eds. E. and R. Rosenblatt)
“The band discoursed a dirge-like piece of music, when the prisoners [John Tague and George Blowers] were conducted to their coffins, on which they kneeled, and the guard filed around and took position in front of them, scarcely half a dozen yards distant. A sergeant put a circle around the neck of each, from which was suspended a white object over the breast, as a target for the executioners. The prisoners were not blindfolded, but looked straight into the muzzles of the guns that shot them to death. The guard were divided into two platoons, one firing at one prisoner, and the other platoon firing at the other prisoner, but there was no reserve to be ordered up in case of failure. Blowers had been sick, his head slightly drooped as if oppressed with a terrible sense of the fate he was about to meet. He had requested that he might see his brother in Co. A, but his brother was not there. He had no heart to see the execution, and had been excused from coming. Tague was firm and erect till the last moment, and when the order was given to fire, he fell like a dead weight, his face resting on the ground, and his feet still remaining on the coffin. Blowers fell at the same time. He exclaimed, ‘Oh dear me!’ struggled a moment, and was dead. Immediately our attention was called away by the loud orders of commanding officers, and we marched in columns around the spot where the bodies of the two men were lying just as they fell. God grant that another such punishment may never be needed in the Potomac Army.” — Wilbur Fisk, Hard Marching Every Day (eds. E. and R. Rosenblatt)
“The duties of a soldier are very unequally divided in regard to time. Some days he may have nothing whatever to do but to pass the time as best he can; and then of a sudden he may be called upon to perform all that his physical powers can possibly accomplish, and often his power of endurance yields to exhaustion, and he is obliged to stop ere his task is completed. These extremes of physical exertion may not accord with the strictest rules of physiology, but they certainly do not conflict with the rules of military life.” – Wilbur Fisk, Hard Marching Every Day (eds. E. and R. Rosenblatt)
“See major, see! The domned skillipins skedaddle extinsively—extinsively sir!” – CSA Captain “Old Tarantula” Reilly, Second Manassas, 1862 (quoted in John J. Hennessy’s Return to Bull Run)
“Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.” — Joanthan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
“Humorous is the only truthful way to tell a sad story.” – Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
“Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.” – David Eagleman, “Metamorphosis” (from Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives)
“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
“We never get anything. We are born with all we have and we never learn. We never get anything new. We all start complete.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
“Life isn’t hard to manage when you’ve nothing to lose.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
“Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money.” – Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
“Never take counsel of your fears.” – Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson
“The difference between constructing a short story and constructing a novel is like the difference between building a rowboat and building a yacht: They both have to float, but one is bigger and grander and meant to carry more people farther. Just as the yacht is not simply a bigger rowboat, the novel is not a bigger short story; knowledge of one doesn’t necessarily translate into knowledge of the other.” – John Stazinski, “A Novel Approach”
“Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it.” – Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
“Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.” – Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
“Remember that war is always a far worse muddle than anything you can produce in peace.” – Sir A. P. Wavell (quoted in Robert K. Krick’s Conquering the Valley)
“You have to live with yourself to live by yourself.” – Eugene Marten, In the Blind
“It is hard to live above time. The church bell sounds the hours and the neighborhood streets are trafficked with our pasts.” — Christine Schutt, “Winterreise”
“Revolutions develop the high qualities of the good and the great, but they cannot change the nature of the vicious and the selfish.” – Jefferson Davis, 1862 (quoted in Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative)
“One does not go to sleep, you had to let sleep come to you, you had to bescatter its path with samples of yourself, maybe just pellets from your thinking, and not be afraid to be a whore for it.” — Gary Lutz, “Womanesque”
“The only thing that will ever even begin to understand a penis is another penis.” — Gary Lutz, “Womanesque”
“The body had only so many quarts of water in it in which the heart might as well just go and get itself drowned once and for all.” — Gary Lutz, “Womanesque”
(Hey! I just found out–one of my short story collections (I don’t know which one, I sent them four) was a finalist in the 2011 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest.)
“Evil that is everyday is lost in life, goes shrewdly into it; becomes a part of habitual blood. First it is a convenient receptacle for blame. It holds all hate. We fasten to it—the permanent and always good excuse. If it were not for it, ah then, we say, we would improve, we would succeed, we would go on. And then one day it is necessary, as if there’s been a pain to breathing for so long that when the pain at last subsides, out of fright, we suffocate.” – William Gass, “Mrs. Mean”
“The people by me primitively guess that I am enemy and hate me: not alone for being different, or disdaining work, or worse, not doing any; but for something that would seem, if spoken for them, words of magic; for I take their souls away—I know it—and I play with them; I puppet them up to something; I march them through strange crowds and passions; I snuffle at their roots.” – William Gass, “Mrs. Mean”
“For the military historian, failure to maintain focus on the true objective is among the easiest mistakes to detect. For the soldier it is among the most difficult blunders to avoid.” – Robert G. Tanner, Stonewall in the Valley
“The trench on the Rebel side of the works was filled with their dead piled together in every way with their wounded. The sight was terrible and ghastly. We helped off their wounded as well we could, and searched for our own wounded in front. Captain Corey was killed and never found. Captain Thomas was found with twelve bullet wounds. He had fallen and then been shot to pieces, possibly by his friends. The horses of the regular battery were so shot that each was not over ten or twelve inches thick.” – Erasmus C. Gilbreath, 20th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Spotsylvania, Virginia, May, 1864 (quoted in If It Takes All Summer, William D. Matter)
“There is no use in hearing the term ‘apartment complex’ unless it is taken immediately to mean a syndrome, a fiesta of symptoms.” – Gary Lutz, “Femme”
“I have been told that when people say they see my father in me, I am to do one of two things. The first is just to tell them that it must be only because he’s trying to get their attention because he wants something again. Otherwise he wouldn’t be showing himself in me of all people. The other is for when people have already stayed too long. I’m supposed to say, ‘Where? Point him out. Show me where, so I can pull him out all the way. Maybe I can shit him out. Think that would work? Let’s go see.’ I have done both, but sometimes I just picture my body glassed over and my father motioning from within, bobbing up now and then between my bones, no big trouble.” – Gary Lutz, “The Summer I Could Walk Again”