Blood On The Tracks Quotes
"Time and again, he imagined climbing the crumbling pylons of the bridge, folding his uniform neatly over the rail, and stepping naked onto the highway to let that roar take him down."
""I can’t," he said. "Bad has filled every part of me. There ain’t room for nothing else.""
""Look at me," he’d yelled, shoving his face into hers. "Look at what I am!""
"The hills and furrows of his body were as close to traveling as she was likely to get, she said, and as far as she had a care to go."
"The wide land brought him some peace, hinted that maybe God was around after all, buried deep in the details and ready to let him be."
"Pain, as his sergeant had said, was weakness leaving the body."
"Once the grunts and the gunners and the insurgents had done their job or died trying, we went in to pick up the HR—the human remains."
"In modern warfare, people disappear. Not because they run off, or go native, or get taken prisoner. I don’t even mean that they’re gone because they’re dead. I mean they vanish."
"Something to be said for taking care of your own problems. But with his temper, Albers wasn’t who I would have chosen to be driving this particular train."
"I’m not a killer," I said, even though I knew I was.
"In war, you do things that people back home will never understand."
"In war, your fellow soldiers become everything to you. Brother, sister, father, son."
"You busy yourself trying to find anything more than a hand and a boot so the family will have something to bury."
"After your buddy gets blown to bits, it’s your job to clean up whatever’s left."
"I’d set my standard by the Sir, who was years older than Cohen."
"The Freight Train Riders of America are violent thugs with a take-no-prisoners mentality."
"I wondered how the fuck you’re supposed to do that."
"The sky shook loose a light and steady fall of snow. The snow tossed the dying sunlight back into the air."
"Everyone who’s come back from Iraq has nervous eyes."
"We drop them back into society as if they were widgets that have simply gone missing for a while."
"Normal is whatever we’ve gotten used to in our own private universe."
"Normal is the devil-ridden quiet of three a.m. when you’re eyeball-to-eyeball with God."
"Ask most people in America what 'normal' is, and they’ll tell you it’s a roof and three squares a day."
"Your turn, he says as he sits in the tank night after night after night. Burning."
"But when we looked inside, we found nothing heroic at all."
"You can’t meet needs that are higher up on the ladder if you don’t take care of those at the base."
"I am here, I am here, I am here. Nothing can harm me."
"You can't stop things from going wrong sometimes. Nobody's fault."
"Asking those kinds of questions was way above my pay grade."
"What happens in Iraq should damn well stay there."
"Sometimes there’s a higher truth than what we know."
"The past is a leech. Digs its head into you and sucks your blood until it leaves you dry."
"What I learned in Iraq is that sometimes there’s a higher truth than what we think we know."
"We take to grief different. Who’s to say his way isn’t better?"
"I’m talking blood and water. Blood may be thicker, but that doesn’t mean you have to choke on it."
"Every word that comes out of your mouth buys you a little more time on this filthy fuck-up of a world."
"Do you believe in God, Corporal Parnell? Sure. I just don’t like Him much. And I don’t trust Him at all."
"You must think I just want to put all of this behind me."
"Hemingway said that in modern war, you will die like a dog for no good reason."
"Nietzsche said that whoever fights monsters should be careful not to become one."