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“What’s obvious,” Morrell observed, “isn’t always true.”

When you lose, Sis, the last war’s never over and done with.

The newspapers extolled every skirmish as one Bonaparte would have admired (clumsy propaganda, in a province that had never reconciled itself to the French revolution), but anyone who believed all the newspapers said deserved nothing better than he got.

A fisherman who wasn’t a born pessimist hadn’t been going to sea long enough.

“It’s not the way it was any more,” he said, half to himself. “Nothing is the way it was anymore.”

The War Department had never forgiven Jake for being right.

Anyone who forces something on someone and then says he will be better for it—you will, I hope, understand me when I say this is difficult to appreciate.

Some of those men were black, the new units going forward along with the white troops who have been in the field for years. The Negro soldiers charged straight at the U.S. trenches; they weren’t skilled in the fire-and-move tactics the veterans had learned by painful experience. And they went down in gruesome numbers. When they screamed, Bartlett couldn’t tell their voices from those of white men.

“Life is hard.” Rodriguez shrugged. “And after life is done, then you die.” He shrugged again. “What can anyone do?”

It was a good question. It was, when Pinkard thought about it, a very good question. If there were any better questions out there, he had no idea what they might be. “You do the best you can, is all,” he answered slowly, and then looked around at the hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere he was currently inhabiting. “If this here is the best I can do, I been doin’ somethin’ wrong up till now.”

Martin was convinced the military police attracted self-righteous sons of bitches the way spilled sugar drew ants.

He sees the country going forward. He doesn’t see the suffering he’s creating to make it go in the direction he wants.

Fashion made a harsh mistress.