Quotes from John Oliver Killens

Western man wrote "his" history as if it were the history of the entire human race.

Most of us came here in chains and most of you came here to escape your chains. Your freedom was our slavery, and therein lies the bitter difference in the way we look at life.

Life is a short walk. There is so little time and so much living to achieve.

the houses much smaller and meek and timid and nondescript, and even the trees were scantily clad.

he hated the phony patriots, the goddamn goose-stepping flag-waving patriots, who really loved the status quo more than they loved the country and its promises unfulfilled.

he was never really in any of these places, excepting in the place wherever pain lived

and he turned his aim on another poor ignorant miserable anonymous bastard crouched behind another gun. A bastard whom he didn't know, had never known, would never know, and couldn't hate specifically, but kill and kill and kill and kill—and

This world is much too sad a place For Fannie's warm and happy smile. The feeling she feels far too deep For the endless heartless guile Of this unfriendly world." He

His novel so lacks the feel and smell of barracks and of the passion of men at war that we remain unmoved, at the close, by Saunders's wistful wish "that whatever was left of the world would come to its senses and build something new and different and new and new and altogether different.

what Killens depicts in his closing chapters actually happened: Negro and white soldiers, all wearing the same U.S. Army uniform, finally turned the weapons of modern warfare on each other, and the only badge of the enemy was the color of his skin.

what Killens depicts in his closing chapters actually happened: Negro and white soldiers, all wearing the same U.S. Army uniform, finally turned the weapons of modern warfare on each other, and the only badge of the enemy was the color of his skin. It happened in Brisbane, Australia, and it was one of the best kept secrets of the war. "And

Everything either this or that and oversimplified. But life was much more complicated. Life was much more than this or that, black or white. Life was grayish. "And

My fight is not for racial sameness but for racial equality and against racial prejudice and discrimination.

What a tiresome place America would be if freedom meant we all had to think alike or be the same color or wear the same gray flannel suit! That road leads to the conformity of the graveyard!