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Top Karl Marlantes Quotes

Browse top 37 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Karl Marlantes.

Favorite Karl Marlantes Quotes

1. "We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy the body for its own sake. Look at overweight executives headed for heart attacks on the way to getting their pictures in Fortune or anorexic models suffering slow starvation on their way to getting their pictures in Vogue. Protecting ego is the general case." ~ Karl Marlantes
2. "But just below the grim tranquility he had learned to display, he cursed with boiling intensity the ambitious men who used him and his troops to further their careers. He cursed the air wing for not trying to get any choppers in through the clouds. He cursed the diplomats arguing about round and square tables. He cursed the South Vietnamese making money off the black market. He cursed the people back home gorging themselves in front of their televisions. Then he cursed God. Then there was no one else to blame and he cursed himself for thinking God would give a shit." ~ Karl Marlantes
3. "We all want to be special, to stand out; there's nothing wrong with this. The irony is that every human being is special to start with, because we're unique to start with. But we then go through some sort of boot camp from the age of zero to about 18 where we learn everything we can about how not to be unique." ~ Karl Marlantes
4. "'Matterhorn' is my metaphor of the Vietnam War - we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again." ~ Karl Marlantes
5. "I grew up in Oregon, where as a teenager I worked with my grandfather Axel on his i shing boat at the mouth of the Columbia River." ~ Karl Marlantes
6. "The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn't teach me how to deal with killing." ~ Karl Marlantes
7. "War is society's dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults." ~ Karl Marlantes
8. "When the peace treaty is signed, the war isn't over for the veterans, or the family. It's just starting." ~ Karl Marlantes
9. "And I think that it's - the military has actually made improvements, so people are considering post-traumatic stress disorder as, at the least, a possible psychological problem. You know, when I was in Vietnam, it was just considered malingering. And we're making progress." ~ Karl Marlantes
10. "For every veteran who goes through a divorce, a wife goes through one, too. For every veteran alone in the basement, there is a wife upstairs, bewildered, isolated and in despair from the dark clouds of war that hangs over family life." ~ Karl Marlantes
11. "I don't want any romantics to go into the military. I'm not a pacifist. I think we need a military, and the better one we have, the better off we are. I don't want kids going in there thinking that it's John Wayne on Iwo Jima. That's not healthy." ~ Karl Marlantes
12. "I mean, if you're proud of what you've done when you've served in the military, well then we call that bragging. And if you are unhappy about what happened, we call that complaining. And so what are you going to do?" ~ Karl Marlantes
13. "'The Odyssey' is the great tale, and I was really taken by 'The Iliad,' so I dig into those things, and when I was a kid I didn't. You've gotta have a certain level of understanding yourself before that stuff really starts to resonate." ~ Karl Marlantes
14. "Vietnam was the first time that Americans of different races had to depend on each other. In the Second World War, they were segregated; it was in Vietnam that American integration happened in the military - and it wasn't easy." ~ Karl Marlantes
15. "When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet." ~ Karl Marlantes
16. "It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn't know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about" ~ Karl Marlantes
17. "There it is." ~ Karl Marlantes
18. "We all have shit on our shoes. We've just got to realize it so we don't track it into the house." ~ Karl Marlantes
19. "He lay before God as a woman opens herself to a man, with legs apart, stomach exposed, arms open. But unlike some women, he did not have the inner strength that allowed them to do such a thing without fear. There was no woman's strength in Mellas at all." ~ Karl Marlantes
20. "He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn't evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares." ~ Karl Marlantes
21. "Over time, continual bad news will discourage any civilian population, and Americans had the lowest tolerance on the planet for bad news." ~ Karl Marlantes
22. "The kids filed quietly to the edge of the strip to wait for the helicopters. Other Marines stopped to watch them, wanting to say an encouraging word yet not daring to break into their private world — a world no longer shared with ordinary people. Some of them were experiencing the last hour of that brief mystery called life." ~ Karl Marlantes
23. "Emotion constricted Hawke's throat. He suddenly understood why the victims of concentration camps had walked quietly to the gas chambers. In the face of horror and insanity, it was the one human thing to do. Not the noble thing, not the heroic thing—the human thing. To live succumbing to the insanity, was the ultimate loss of pride." ~ Karl Marlantes
24. "It is not trivial to lie in a report. . . . At the time I wrote it I actually believed what I wrote to be true, fervently. . . . Yet, when I wrote it, I also knew it wasn't true. I call this the lie of two minds. "I" convinced "myself." The I that did the convincing was the one who needed desperately to justify the entire experience, to make it sane and right and okay and approved. Myself was convinced as the moral self, the part of me I would want to be a judge in a legal system. This moral part of us, however, in these extreme situations, is vulnerable to the overwhelming force of that part of us that needs to justify our actions. . . With this lie I'd lost myself. Perhaps this too adds to the shame." ~ Karl Marlantes
25. "Without man there would be no evil. But there was also no good, nothing moral built over the world of fact. Humans were responsible for it all." ~ Karl Marlantes
26. "It won't hurt you. It's just to kill plants. It's called Agent Orange...and it won't bother humans." ~ Karl Marlantes
27. "The fourteen-man snake moved in spasms. . . Their eyes flickered rapidly back and forth as they tried to look in all directions at once. They carried Kool-Aid packages, Tang — anything to kill the chemical taste of the water in their plastic canteens. Soon the smears of purple and orange Kool-Aid on their lips combined with the fear in their eyes to make them look like children returning from a birthday party at which the hostess had shown horror films." ~ Karl Marlantes
28. "He ran as he'd never run before, with neither hope nor despair. He ran because the world was divided into opposites and his side had already been chosen for him, his only choice being whether or not to play his part with heart and courage. He ran because fate had placed him in a position of responsibility and he had accepted the burden. He ran because his self-respect required it. He ran because he loved his friends and this was the only thing he could do to end the madness that was killing and maiming them." ~ Karl Marlantes
29. "The chanting went on, the musicians giving in to the rhythm of their own being, finding healing in touching that rhythm, and healing in chanting about death, the only real god they knew." ~ Karl Marlantes
30. "The time for debilitating fear is before and after the mission." ~ Karl Marlantes
31. "Cynicism is no more mature than naïveté. You're no more mature, just more burned." ~ Karl Marlantes
32. "I began writing 'Matterhorn' in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript." ~ Karl Marlantes
33. "I knew many Marines had done brave deeds that no one saw and for which they got no medals at all. I was having a very hard time carrying those medals and didn't have the insight or maturity to know what to do with my combination of guilt and pride." ~ Karl Marlantes
34. "I mean... if you're raised as a decent human being, killing somebody is against every moral thing you've ever been taught. And so, generally, in combat it's 'krauts,' the 'gooks,' the 'yanks' - whatever you want to do to try and make it so that it's not a human being." ~ Karl Marlantes
35. "I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me." ~ Karl Marlantes
36. "In the military I could exercise the power of being automatically respected because of the medals on my chest, not because I had done anything right at the moment to earn that respect. This is pretty nice. It's also a psychological trap that can stop one's growth and allow one to get away with just plain bad behavior." ~ Karl Marlantes
37. "Once we recognize our shadow's existence we must resist the enticing step of going with its flow." ~ Karl Marlantes

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Today's Quote

Friends always forget those whom fortune forsakes."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

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Wit
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