Quotes from Herman Wouk

You probably feel you have a measureless supply of it, but you haven't. Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end—only at the end it becomes more obvious. Use your time while you have it, Willie, in making something of yourself.

I have found out what it's like to be crazy. It is to stand apart and observe ordinary life all around you with the panic of an actor on stage who has forgotten his lines and his business. What one doesn't realize in ordinary mental health is that daily life is a show. You have to put on a right costume, to improvise right speeches, to do right actions, and all this isn't automatic, it takes concentration and work and a simply

Germany's grand aim, he says, must be a Nordic racial alliance in which England maintains its sea empire, while Germany as its equal partner takes first place on the continent and acquires new soil in the east.

None of the authorities have experienced the worst of enough typhoons to make airtight generalizations. None of the authorities, moreover, are anxious to acquire the experience. The

to you, I have never known anything like it. But I have brains enough to know that a bed takes up a very small space in a house, and that you don't spend a marriage sleeping with a person but waking with her. It's the waking part with you that I will no longer endure, come hell or high water. I will not be driven on and on to that looming goal, a love nest in the suburbs. I WANT NO PART OF IT OR OF YOU, do you understand? If I had

South Wind had been, in Marjorie's visions, a new clear world, a world where a grimy Bronx childhood and a fumbling Hunter adolescence were forgotten dreams, a world where she could at last find herself and be herself—clean, fresh, alone, untrammelled by parents. In a word, it had been the world of Marjorie Morningstar.

the DeMille films were foolishness. I was born to do this, and I can do it precisely because I thought the whole religion through when I broke away. It takes someone who knows—not believes—to capture and picture the storytelling truth about Moishe Rabenu in a film.

What matters is living with dignity, with decency, and without fear, in the way that best honors one's intelligence and one's birth. Part 2 THE FAITH

For the rest the Navy is a third-rate career for third-rate people, offering a sort of skimpy security in return for twenty or thirty years of a polite penal servitude.

This country of ours consists of pioneers, after

The girl you marry, and the woman you must make a life with, are two different people.

Rothmore rasped, Do you think an IQ is something real, like a nose? It's a ...number dreamed up by...psychologists, and all it proves is that farmers aren't as smart as psychologists. If the farmers had enough time to wast to make up an IQ system, the psychologists would all come out morons and the farmers geniuses.

Well, normality, you know, is a fiction in psychiatry. It's all relative. No adult is without problems except a happy imbecile.

havng an affair with a man was a plunge into change, shocking irreversible change, like an amputation It was not a dip in a pool, after which one came out and dried the same body with the same hands. And as for the much touted memroes, far from treasuring them, she found them a continuing torment, which she would willingly have burned from her brain cells...Yet for this sex, good or mot so good, she had paid a steep price. Marjorie felt rifled of her own identity.

shot at. All I did at Wotje was lose control

Neville did a remarkable simulation of running in fourteen directions at once, whimpering, screeching, and snapping his teeth. The seder stopped

Phil's a slow-thinking sort, so I usually tied him up. He's one of the few communists I've ever been able to stand. They're like the abolitionists. Their cause may be just, but their personalities are repulsive. I don't really know whether they're right or not, and I don't care.

When you're at the bottom, there's no place to go but up," said

he now knew the difference between honest fright and animal terror. One was bearable, human, not incapacitating; the other was moral castration.

Marjorie, darling, listen to me. You know—God knows—you're not the first girl in my life nor the second, but I swear to you this is new. The reason you're so crazily in love is that I am, too. There's no other reason. It happens once in a lifetime to everyone, and I swear to God I'm beginning to think it's happened for us.

Again, once one is attacked in war one can either give up and submit to looting, or one can fight. To fight means to try to frighten the other side, by a lot of murder, into stopping the war.

But whatever the civilian structure, let our people hereafter entrust military affairs to its trained generals, and insist that politicians keep hands off the war machine.

War is politics implemented by the use of force.

Pug thought, that in a trivial way was like the President's. Some people had it, some didn't. He himself had none of it. In the Navy the quality was not overly admired. The name for it was "grease." Men who possessed it had a way of climbing fast; they also had a way of relying upon it, till they got too greasy and slipped.