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I don’t value my life enough.

Stephen was appalled by the idea of being separated from the men he had fought with. He despised the war, but could not leave until he had seen it through until the end.

This is not a war. It is an exploration of how far men can be degraded.

Non-believers finding faith in fear.

His own [childhood] seemed so long ago that it was as is someone had lived it for him.

He was surprised by his own brutality, he assumed that it was caused by fear.

He could remember this compassion but he no longer felt it.

He wanted to answer them with steel and explosives, with metal tearing into soft tissue and spinning on the bone. When the war was over there would be a place for contemplation, even generosity, but in the meantime he treasured his hatred as a means of saving his own life and those of his men.

No child or future generation will know what this was like.

What truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute — for horses.

Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices.

Dickens...spoke in a new voice, in a new form, to a new audience, of a new world, about several old ideas reconsidered for the new system of capitalism—that care and respect are owed to the weakest and meekest in society, rather than to the strongest; that the ways in which class and money divide humans from one another are artificial and dangerous; that pleasure and physical comfort are positive goods; that the spiritual lives of the powerful have social and economic ramifications. We might today call this an ecological perspective, an intuitive understanding of the social world as a web rather than a hierarchy—the quintessential modern mode of seeing the world. Dickens grasped this idea from the earliest stages of his career and demonstrated his increasingly sophisticated grasp of it in the plots, characterizations, themes, and style of every single novel he wrote. This is the root source of his greatness.