Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.
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They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
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Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
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When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
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There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
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I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
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Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.
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There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
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When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.
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His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.
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I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.
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The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
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Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
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Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
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That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
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Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
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A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
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There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.
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Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts
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I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I. -men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
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'We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood.
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I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
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The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
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Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.
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The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
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America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds.
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Never mistake motion for action.
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Never confuse movement with action.
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We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
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