Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes
"Five drinks in forty minutes is probably pushing it, but Billy needs some refreshment after the hotel lobby."
"Life in the Army is miserable that way. You fuck up, they scream at you, you fuck up some more and they scream some more."
"It was raw. It was some fucked-up shit. It was the blood and breath of the world's worst abortion, baby Jesus shat out in squishy little turds."
"Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives."
"You can dodge an RPG, that damn crazy thing lamely fluttering at you, spitting and smoking like a cheap Mexican firework."
"His ordeal becomes theirs and vice versa, some sort of mystical transference takes place and it's just too much for most of them."
"If a bullet’s going to get you, it’s already been fired."
"Americans are children who must go somewhere else to grow up, and sometimes die."
"The soul is an actual, tangible thing, Billy knows this now."
"What you did in Iraq, you went head-to-head with some very bad guys and you kicked their ass. Even a pacifist twerp like me can appreciate that."
"It's hard living in your own head twenty-four/seven."
"If the father loved the war, how could the son stay away?"
"With everything you’ve done over there, what do you think it’ll do to us if something happens to you?"
"The morning after 9-11 Ray was on the air advocating 'nuclear cleansing' of certain Middle East capitals."
"The war is out there somewhere but Billy can’t feel it, like his sole experience with morphine when he could not feel pain."
"What was amazing was this actually seemed to help. His mother calmed down."
"Later he would recall the scrabbling action in her hug, as if she were sliding down a cliff face and clawing for purchase."
"You just pull in, you aren’t thinking about accomplishing anything, you just wanna get through the day with all your guys alive."
"He knew intuitively the thought would bring him down and so it did, mushrooming into awareness despite all best efforts."
"It’s not that he’s jealous so much as profoundly terrified."
"I’m a good soldier, aren’t I a good soldier? So what does it mean when a good soldier feels this bad?"
"Mortal fear is the ghetto of the human soul, to be free of it something like the psychic equivalent of inheriting a hundred million dollars."
"The brain struggles to match the media version to the actual man."
"If there is real knowledge to be had in the Texas public schools he never found it."
"Sometimes your body feels dead with weariness of it, other times it’s like a migraine you think you can reason with."
"Life in the Army has been a crash course in the scale of the world."
"So fuck that, he was done with football after his sophomore year, except the Army is pretty much the same thing."
"But isn’t Norm the boss? So it seems like he could . . . Whatever."
"We're at a football game, hel-lo? It looks completely natural."
"The vast majority of Americans support this war, and they sure as heck support the troops fighting the war."
"It's like we finally had something to cheer about."
"Self-interest is a powerful motivator in human affairs."
"You won’t know shit sitting inside that damn box."
"We’re not terrorists," Billy deadpans, pushing it.
"What if they paid bad money?" says Mango, getting into the spirit.
"Billy," he moans, "Billy, Billy, a cheerleader? Oh God she’s fuckin’ beautiful, Billy, how’d you get with that?"
"I think you better." She’s worried, Billy realizes. She’s fearful of a scene.
"Christian girls fuck like rabbits, vato. If you’re gonna give up sin, you gotta sin, you know?"
"Talk is cheap but money screams, this is our country, guys. And I fear for it."
"And I’m certainly sensitive to that, but we’re talking about an entirely separate arena here."
"He doesn’t have any holes to hit, what does it matter," says f-bomb.
"I think sometimes nothing is better than something. I mean, I’d rather have nothing than let this guy use me like his bitch."
"Nothing looks so real as a fake, apparently."
"All soldiers learn this in basic training, how a forearm applied to the carotid artery cuts off blood flow to the brain, rendering your victim unconscious in seconds."
"His reality is their reality’s bitch; what they don’t know is more powerful than all the things he knows."
"Take us someplace safe. Take us back to the war."