The Forever War Quotes
"To say that The Forever War is the best science fiction war novel ever written is to damn it with faint praise. It is, for all its techno-extrapolative brilliance, as fine and woundingly genuine a war story as any I’ve read."
"Perhaps the most important war novel written since Vietnam…Haldeman, a veteran, is a flat-out visionary…and protagonist William Mandella’s attempt to survive and remain human in the face of an absurd, almost endless war is harrowing, hilarious, heartbreaking, and true."
"The Forever War does what the very best science fiction does: It deals with extremes both societal and teleological; it places a frame around humankind’s place in the universe to show us what is outside the frame; and it functions simultaneously at the literal and metaphorical level."
"In today’s world, where we think declaring war on abstract nouns like terror is a winning strategy, we need The Forever War."
"Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man."
"All of us were a good two hundred meters away. With my image converter turned up to about forty power, I watched her disappear over the rim of the crater."
"After you have lived in your suit for a month or so you should be able to survive falling down, but right now you just don’t know enough."
"I know a good exercise," I said. She smiled without looking up from her tray. "Have anybody for tonight?"
"We weren’t supposed to use lights, to 'avoid detection.'"
"The landscape wasn’t all that interesting, anyhow."
"The uneven ground was the consistency of frozen spiderwebs; every time you put your foot down, you’d sink half an inch with a squeaking crunch."
"We couldn’t build the thing underground—it’d just fill up with helium II."
"Hell, Mandella, I feel okay, just tired. Since I fell I been a little dizzy."
"What the hell does it use for sensory organs? No eyes, or ears, or…"
"We were each allowed one stimtab. Without it, no one could have marched an hour."
"Mercy is a luxury, a weakness we can’t afford to indulge in at this stage of the war."
"They were thoroughly repulsive, but their worst feature was not a difference from human beings, but a similarity…Whenever the laser had opened a body cavity, milk-white glistening veined globes and coils of organs spilled out, and their blood was dark clotting red."
"But they were right. We blasted away from Stargate 1, made a few course corrections and then just dropped, for about an hour."
"Filters up." Gray haze of smoke and dust. Clods of dirt falling with a sound like heavy raindrops.
"I knew it was all purest soyashit, and I hated the men who had taken such obscene liberties with my mind."
"The noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters."
"Lifeless, spread-eagled, he slid halfway to the bottom, shoveling dirt into the perfectly symmetrical hole where the bubble had chewed indiscriminately through plastic, hair, skin, bone, and brain."
"All God’s children got hemoglobin—and like the teddy bears, their guts looked pretty much like guts to my untrained eye."
"What might have happened if we had sat down and tried to communicate?"
"Back in the twentieth century, they had established to everybody’s satisfaction that 'I was just following orders' was an inadequate excuse for inhuman conduct."
"I was disgusted with the human race, disgusted with the army and horrified at the prospect of living with myself for another century or so."
"I suspected that the next time humans met Taurans in ground combat, we would be more evenly matched. And I was right."
"Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century."
"Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy’s information, political postures—dozens, literally dozens of factors."
"Sometimes you have to throw away a battle in order to help win the war."
"It's a miracle she survived to get into surgery. So there's a big chance she won’t make it back to Earth."
"Don’t try to jolly me. Tell me about vacuum welding, about your childhood, anything. Just don’t bullshit me about getting back to Earth."
"Life is a bunch of cells walking around with a common purpose. If that common purpose is to get my ass—"
"You think, because your mother is sixty, she's outgrown her need for love? She needs it more than you do. Even now. Especially now."
"This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but you're stuck with it."
"I've been so looking forward to meeting you," she said. "Beth has told me all about you—one cold beer, right?"
"I don't keep any written records, but I have an excellent memory. Tell me what sort of a job you're interested in, what your qualifications are, what salary you'll accept, and so on."
"Eventually you're going to have to get a job, and this is one job for which you are uniquely trained."
"I'll keep you in mind and talk to some people."
"A lot has changed, these twenty years. You've got to change too."
"They make a big to-do about obvious things, and when it gets to the rough parts—"
"War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior." - von Clausewitz
"Enjoy your peace of mind while you still have it."
"We were remarkably healthy victims of a terminal disease, trying to cram a lifetime of sensation into a half of a year."
"I wondered how many other worlds they’d colonized while my back was turned. Lose an arm, grow a new one?"
"We old fossils have to...keep our perspective."
"So long as each man in the squad kept his head about him. And just fought like hell to stay alive."
"But an officer should provide gallant example. Go down with the ship. Stride the parapet as if unafraid."
"Hope that time dilation puts many years between each of your battles."
"No, combat officers only. The computer facilities and energy you go through in three weeks would keep the Earth running for several days."
"Part of every creche is an artificial womb that takes care of a person the first eight or ten months after quickening."
"In a way, it makes my job simpler. A lot of diseases simply no longer exist."
"I didn’t seriously plan on being the lucky one."
"Seems like a drastic way to solve the population problem."
"No birth trauma. A billion perfectly adjusted homosexuals."
"Where is John Wayne now that we really need him?"
"Perfectly adjusted by present-day Earth standards."
"A failed pacifist, which gives you a mild neurosis."
"And now, well, it's so rare...I doubt that any of the men and women have any strong feelings about it, one way or the other."
"I don't feel any differently toward you because of it."
"I'm sure you all have things to do, goodbyes and such. Don't let me hold you prisoner."
"They hope eventually to trace this complex pattern back through time and space and find the Taurans’ home planet."
"It's not an exact science; they could be doing something very wrong, and the results wouldn't show up for centuries."
"You can’t abrogate your authority by publicly doing a job…that obviously should be detailed."
"Officers and men got drunk together and never saluted or used titles. They lost the war. But the other side didn’t have any fun."
"You should have killed the bastard outright."
"The hanging didn’t kill him. He had a heart attack."
"Love was a fragile blossom; love was a delicate crystal; love was an unstable reaction with a half-life of about eight months."
"Bullshit, I said, and accused him of wearing cultural blinders; thirty centuries of prewar society taught that love was one thing that could last to the grave and even beyond."
"All electrical activity in their bodies ceased, which killed them instantly."
"Every now and then, a Tauran would appear at the edge of the field, evidently to see whether any of us were left. Sometimes we’d shoot an arrow at him, for practice."
"There was a more likely possibility. They simply saturated it with laser fire and waited for us to go stir-crazy and turn off the generator."
"Get nova bombs from ship. Carry to edge of field. Move field."
"There was no doubt that the bombs went off. For a couple of seconds it was hot as the interior of a star outside."
"We slept a lot. Charlie and Diana played chess by scraping symbols in the snow."
"I dispersed the people evenly around the area, so they might not get us with a single shot."
"The ship was designed for a maximum crew of twelve, so we stayed outside in shifts of seven to keep from straining the life support systems."
"Wheels. One day Charlie asked me from what country my name originated; it sounded weird to him."
"A mandala is a wheel-like design that symbolized the cosmos, the cosmic mind, God, or whatever needed a symbol."
"The 1143-year-long war had been begun on false pretenses and only continued because the two races were unable to communicate."
"The Taurans hadn’t known war for millennia, and toward the beginning of the twenty-first century it looked as though mankind was ready to outgrow the institution as well."
"The fact was, Earth’s economy needed a war, and this one was ideal."
"Once they could talk, the first question was 'Why did you start this thing?' and the answer was 'Me?'"
"You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, because…you’re free men and women. The war is over."
"I am over ten billion individuals but only one consciousness."
"There are some planets, however, on which humans are born in the normal, mammalian way."
"All it does is go out five light-years and come back to Middle Finger, very fast. Every ten years I age about a month."
"I never found anybody else and I don’t want anybody else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. If I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse."