Quotes from Ben Fountain

Fear is just another word for ignorance.7

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders," Hermann Goering, the number two man in the Reich, once observed. "That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

A harsh thing for any young man to hear, but this is part of every youth's education in the world, learning the risks are never fully revealed until you commit.

Maybe we need a war now and then to get our priorities straight," a second man says.

Don't be scared, Shroom said. Because you're going to be scared. So when you start to get scared, don't be scared.

But a lot of the time that's how it works, life gets so dark until we think all the light's gone out of us. But it's there, it's always there. If we just open the door a crack the light comes pouring in.

This is what he truly envies of these people, the luxury of terror as a talking point, and at this moment he feels so sorry for himself that he could break right down and cry.

Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and as every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow. Spend any amount of time in the realms of deadly force and you will witness certain of its fraught and terrible forms.

Hummer with six doors to a side and black-tinted windows for maximum privacy. "What I'm talking a-bout!" cried Sergeant Dime as he pounced on the bar, everyone whooping over all the pimp finery, but after destroying all hopes for a quick recovery Billy subsides into a gnarled, secret funk. "Billy," says

Life in the Army is miserable that way. You fuck up, they scream at you, you fuck up some more and they scream some more, but overlying all the small, petty, stupid, basically foreordained fuckups looms the ever-present prospect of the life-fucking fuckup, a fuckup so profound and all-encompassing as to crush all hope of redemption.

In a way it's so easy, all he has to do is say what they want to hear and they're happy, they love him, everybody gets along. Sometimes he has to remind himself there's no dishonor in it. He hasn't told any lies, he doesn't exaggerate, yet so often he comes away from these encounters with the sleazy, gamey aftertaste of having lied.

Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all

What might be merely embarrassing in real life is made obscene and hostile by TV.

People are pushing, chesting up, there's much half-assed shoving and garbled smack talk about who dissed who and who crossed whose line and of course everybody's gotta have their boy's back. A melee, you'd call it. A fracas. Not quite a throw-down brawl right here on the sacred turf of Texas Stadium.

They want words. They want contact. They want pictures and autographs. Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

have you not had your morning glass of shut up?

Over the years I've come to realize that in a broad sense I'm interested in power and politics. I'm interested in how individuals try to eke out some wiggle room within these large institutions . . . how they eke out some measure of freedom and personal space and integrity . . . trying to negotiate their way toward some sort of, if not happiness, then at least accommodation or peace with themselves.

It's been hard times in America—how did we get this way? So scared all the time

It's an important thing and a necessary thing as a writer to always be reaching outside of yourself. They say write what you know. But what you know is rarely enough. You need to know more. But you've got to approach it with a lot of respect and humility. You owe it to the people and experience you're trying to understand. It's not a casual thing.

This does it; they throw back their heads and roar. In a way it's so easy, all he has to do is say what they want to hear and they're happy, they love him, everybody gets along. Sometimes he has to remind himself there's no dishonor in it. He hasn't told any lies, he doesn't exaggerate, yet so often he comes away from these encounters with the sleazy, gamey aftertaste of having lied.

A young man needs to know where he stands in the world, not just as a matter of basic human dignity but as determinants in the ways and means of survival, and what you might hope to gain by application of honest effort—

It's going to be a long, lonesome eleven months in Iraq, long and lonesome being the best-case scenario

Next thing she knows she's lying flat on her back and three grizzled Mexicans are standing over her, trying

Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity.