Lovely War Quotes
"You male gods are all rapacious pigs," she says dismissively. "I grant you, Husband, you’re less horrible than some. You all brag of your exploits. You’re no more loving than an anvil is. Fickle and capricious and completely self-centered. You’re incapable of love. Just as you’re incapable of dying."
"I envy the mortals. It’s because they’re weak and damaged that they can love."
"We need nothing. They’re lucky to need each other."
"I wouldn’t," he said seriously. He slid back into the music. "When I trip and fall, then?" She hoped this would come across as a bit of a joke. He pressed his hand a shade more firmly into her back. "I won’t let you fall."
"I’m the source of love," she says, "but no one will ever truly love me. The fountain of passion, but I will never know a true passion of my own."
"Do you know what it’s like," she says, "to spend eternity embedded in _every single love story—_the fleeting and the true, the trivial and the everlasting? I am elbow deep in love, working in passion the way artists work in watercolors. I feel it all."
"May I see you again before I go?" "How soon?" she asked James. "As soon as possible." "How much?" asked Hazel. The smile faded, leaving only that intent gaze in its place. "As much as I may."
"It sounds delicious, Hazel." He turned to me very seriously. "Two slices, please."
"With the Great War in its fourth year, Britons needed cake."
"How does the old Gaelic ditty go? O ye’ll tak’ the high road, and I’ll tak’ the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland a’fore ye?"
"His words caught Hazel with the tines of her fork still in her mouth, and a very large bite of cake melting on her tongue."
"You’re a brand-new piece of sheet music," she said slowly, "for a song which, once played, I’d swear I’d always known."
"Remember, we’re all God’s children. Be braver than I’ve been."
"Keeping the world safe for people to practice their audition pieces seems like the one good reason to fight this war. If music stops, and art ceases, and beauty fades, what have we then?"
"The war was hers now. It was inside her. No more a matter of headlines and jargon."
"God, bring me home to her," he whispered. "Please."
"I would name a dog Pepper. I always wished for a dog."
"Ordinary life is fairly well summed up in Christmas choir rehearsals."
"Asking you to dance was the most foolish thing I’ve ever done. Look what it did to me."
"My siblings: Maggie is fifteen, still in school, and keen to become a typist."
"I’d eat a picnic someplace wild and hot. The Congo, perhaps, or the Amazon rain forest."
"Books: Evelina by Fanny Burney. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë."
"I wouldn’t mind playing in all the huts. I’m sure black soldiers enjoy music."
"You conduct yourself with dignity and pride, young man, you hear me?"
"My interest in humans is entirely spiritual."
"If you love something, you must set it free."
"The work of the priesthood, preparing souls to cross the river to my domain without undue fear, is a great help to me."
"Unprepared souls are sticky. Most inconvenient."
"I volunteered soon after my village was destroyed by the Germans."
"I’m sure most are as much gentlemen as anyone else."
"I climbed to the citadel, I left a sinkful of dirty dishes and accepted the challenge."
"It’s not such a terrible thing, you know, being Belgian."
"My father, my brother, my two uncles. My cousin, and many friends from my childhood. All gone. My home, everything."
"While those I loved were murdered, I hid in a convent."
"I volunteered for the Y so I wouldn’t be too much of a burden to her."
"After supper, soldiers began filtering into the vast YMCA relief hut, bound for games tables, a library, the chapel, and a coffee station where Hazel waited to make cheerful conversation."
"Reveille sounded. 'Somebody hit that alarm clock,' moaned a soldier."
"Make it minor. Drop the top note half a step."
"Joey stretched the second note like taffy and cracked the next three like peanut shells."
"Captain Hamilton Fish III strode in. 'Quit horsing around. You’ll miss your grub.'"
"Europe folded his arms. 'You know how to write that out in musical notation?'"
"'We’ll get to that Front before long,' Herbert Simpson said."
"'Smart means knowing when to talk and when to shut up.'"
"A tender, romantic piece, filled with longing."
"'Who wants a sad song? Who’s got time for that? That’s pathetic, if you ask me.'"
"'Your rifle is your life,' the trainer said."
"'Off to dinner with you now,' the trainer said."
"Nothing in this world had prepared James Alderidge for life in the trenches."
"'Make yourselves at home. The old-timers here can fill you in.'"
"'It’s German artillery,' Packer said. 'But that’s just Fritz having a sneeze now and then.'"
"The most important thing, with any kind of gas, is to stay calm. Folks want to panic and run, but you suck in a lot more air. Stay calm."
"Put your mask on. If you’ve lost your mask, you still stay calm. If all else fails, piss on a hankie and breathe through that."
"It subverts it. It makes the song a rebellion."
"There’s a whole lotta something bottled up in there. Emotion. Intensity. Anger’s not quite the word, but it’s the closest I can find."
"Play your way into the life you dream of. Play your way into legend."
"Dignity and pride. They can’t take that away from you."
"You’re a mystery, Colette Fournier. That deep, dark place you sing from."
"Here; you’ve been carrying that alone for a long time. Let me carry it with you awhile."
"Only shoot when you're sure," Pete said. "Don't shoot the dummy. A sniper has zero shots to waste. Every one's got to hit its target. Because it tells the enemy where you are."
"To find us. To study the bullet angle. They'll point their artillery right at us. Kaboom!"
"Maybe laughing was the only way to survive it all."
"Everyone had their job to do. Survival depended on doing it. And the only way to end this war was to win it."
"There are some fine, unprejudiced men too," Captain Fish added earnestly. "I am certain that once this war is done, your courageous example will help redress that inequality."
"It’s so big,_ she thought. I’ll never find him."
"You have to admire them. They are so very brave to keep on living."
"He wanted to hold this girl and never let go."
"Then be a monster," she said. "Do what you must to survive, so you can come back to me."
"If they have a deep understanding of love, the French have an even deeper understanding of food and when it is to be eaten."
"Let them start their dreadful wars, let destruction rain down, and let plague sweep through, but I will still be here, doing my work, holding humankind together with love like this." - APHRODITE
"Can you recall your first real kiss? All that rushed upward from your feet to your face, all that awoke in you that you hadn’t realized was sleeping?"
"There’s nothing like the rightness of it. Nothing like its wonder."
"If James and his comrades in 3rd Section and 2nd Section weren’t working, they were sleeping. They slept on the ground. They slept on mounds of artillery. They slept standing up. They slept while marching."
"It’s all right. You’re safe here. You’ll be back on your feet in no time."
"How did one nation produce both humble souls and killers?"
"Until we have firm proof otherwise, we hold out hope."
"You know that I can never be the boy you used to know."
"The Boche did their best to kill me, but I didn’t hold still to let ’em."
"What I’ve done, and what I’ve seen, will always be with me."
"Why me? Why do I get to live when so many die?"
"It’s not as if this was just a couple of bad guys. Sick in the head, you know? This is all over the place. All over the military. All over the South. And not just the South."
"If it’s madness telling you to marry that girl and be happy, whose advice would you rather have?"
"Nobody does, but that girl, there, will help you."
"Sometimes it feels like America’s short on all of that."
"But America produced you, so it can’t be all bad."
"If you have a family, and you can be near them, do."
"You’ll always be a pianist, Aubrey. No one can take that from you."
"You’re not a monster for living. There’s no crime in picking apples."
"I wrote songs for Joey in the trenches. I wrote songs for you, too."
"Life is short. I won’t waste any more of it waiting for you."
"I waited once to kiss you, and almost lost my chance."
"If the war’s taught me anything at all, it’s that life is short."
"Life’s never quite like that," Hades says. "Particularly, there’s the war. This one. The current one. It came along just as their sons—both James and Hazel’s, and Aubrey and Colette’s—would soon reach draft age."
"Love and Art go together like baritone and alto, paint and canvas, like sunrise and a burning atmosphere. Anytime you want to tell a story, I’ll bring the soundtrack."
"I scrabble in sticks and clay," she says. "You make of my work a temple."
"If it pleases you," she tells him, "look after their children, in this war. James and Hazel’s. Colette and Aubrey’s. Bring them, I beg you, safely home."
"One never gets quite what one hoped for from Death," she muses.
"We say a building is made of brick," she says, "but it’s the mortar, filling in the cracks, that holds it all together. That provides the strength."
"You say perfection limits you," he says. "But you’re not so perfect as you like to let on."
"All I’m saying," Hephaestus says, "is that, if love demands brokenness, don’t count yourself out."
"You must have no idea how much I look at you, Goddess," he tells his wife. "I tell myself, I can stop anytime."