Quotes from Michael Shaara

Why do there have to be men like that, men who enjoy another man's dying?

Southern women like their men religious and a little mad.

Perhaps it was only that when you try to put it into words you cannot express it truly, it never sounds as you dream it.

The thing about the heart was that you could not coax it or force it, as you could any other disease. Will power meant nothing.

In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that enormous, unanswerable question.

A man who has been shot at is a new realist, and what do you say to a realist when the war is a war of ideals?

It rained all that night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.

I don't really understand it. Never have. The more I think on it the more it horrifies me. How can they look in the eyes of a man and make a slave of him and then quote the Bible?

Longstreet stayed up talking, as long as there was company, as long as there was a fire. Because when the fire was gone and the dark had truly come there was no way he could avoid the dead faces of his children.

There ought to be more than just that metallic end, and then silence, then the worms, and sometimes he believed, but just this moment he did not believe at all...there was nothing beyond the sound of the guns...not even silence, just an end.

He was one of those, like Stuart, who looked on war as God's greatest game.

To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. That is Ã¢â'¬Â¦ a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men.

Jackson is gone - not entirely gone; Jackson was there today watching, and Ewell sees his eyes - but you cannot blame him for not being Jackson. You must make do with the tools God has given for the job.

In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.

I wish we could take the hill. Could flood right on over it and end the war, wipe them all away in one great motion. But we can't. No matter how much I wish...or trust in God...

And yet suddenly, terribly, he wanted it again, the way it used to be, arms linked together, all drunk and singing beautifully into the night, with visions of death from the afternoon and dreams of death in the coming dawn, the night filled with a monstrous and temporary glittering joy, fat moments, thick seconds dropping like warm rain, jewel after jewel.

The great white joker in the sky dooms us all to stupidity or poverty from birth. No two things on earth are equal or have an equal chance, not a leaf or a tree.