Quotes from Kathleen Rooney

Munson was a member of the unit to which Corporal Gault assigned me after I flew my tenth mission back home to Rampont, a unit that would soon be known throughout the world as part of the Lost Battalion. That summer it was still simply the 1st Battalion of the 308th Regiment of the United States Army's 77th Infantry Division, under the command of newly minted Major Charles White Whittlesey.

but as any poet can testify, limits encourage both inspiration and decisiveness.

In order not to bother or be bothered by ghosts, you just act like you're one of them. That's what I do.

one were happy, then one might stay in with a book, say, and not go out hunting for fun.

thought of that image as I was looking across the table at Max, at him looking back at me, old me, much older me: fifty-six. Max was born in 1906 and thus had always been—would always be—younger than I, by six years if I lied about my age, as I always did, or by seven if I was honest, which I was only in the privacy of my mind.

We soldiers learned vigilance until our technique was flawless and thoughtless; we learned it or we died. But then what? Once we'd ingrained it so deeply as to make it automatic—stay alert, sleep light, trust nothing—we couldn't unlearn it when the danger had passed.

Before the war few pastimes afforded me greater pleasure than wandering through the city, ending up somewhere strange. But now, having been twice officially lost—lost as in waylaid, misplaced, unreachable, doomed, lost as in the Lost Battalion—I find the appeal is itself somewhat lost to me.

Cher Ami, my savior, I grieve you, I think absurdly, eyes to the sky.

spent my first Christmas in the city alone. Alone, but not lonely; in the state of being solitary but not the condition of wishing myself otherwise. Solitude enrobed me like a long, warm coat.

and my men were in the film to grant it authenticity, yet somehow we were the least convincing thing in it. The whole experience was a pungent reminder—a reminder I didn't need—that in a contest against passion, truth always makes a poor showing.

The second encirclement would be a disaster, and it would win me commendation and international fame. It would leave my brain full—as it is now, here on the Toloa's deck—of visions of pleading faces and ruined bodies, of phantom agonies that scour the parts of my consciousness where I once held hope for the future, like the pains that plague a maimed man where a limb's been cut away.

Solitude enrobed me like a long, warm coat.

Canyons of incomprehension yawn between me and most other human beings, and I keep acting as if it's possible for me to reach across and join them on their side, to span the gap between who they believe me to be and who I really am.

Like the angel holding the globe on the statue's pedestal, we infantry tried to hand the world back to itself intact, though we who fought have been blown apart. Whether the world will hold together remains to be seen.

What makes you seek your fortune here / In Gotham? You must be as queer / As I am, and a million other / Insects far from home and Mother.

For me, a peaceful atmosphere devoid of noise and distractions is absolutely the worst place for poetry, likely to wind me up in a doomed attempt to stare down a blank page. My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight.

Oftentimes, what causes old people to become poor walkers is poor walking. One must bend one's knees. One must lift one's feet up. One must be unceasing. One mustn't shuffle.

I didn't believe in love at first sight. In fact, as I would soon be reminded by seemingly every literate person in New York, I had written and published more than a few poems lampooning the very idea of it. But one need not believe in something for it to happen anyway.

I am old and all I have left is time. I don't mean time to live; I mean free time. Time to fill. Time to kill until time kills me. I walk and walk and think and think.

It was a good lie, whoever had come up with it. Blaming the Germans wasn't an option—too many incriminating duds still littered our funkholes—but since the French 75-millimeter gun was also the main field weapon of the American artillery, guilt could be plausibly shifted in that direction.

Throughout the war I looked back on that evening at the Harvard Club with great fondness, recalling it as the moment when I found my footing among the officers and struck up some of my truest friendships. But then the Pocket tainted my nostalgia, as it tainted everything else.

No one who'd actually been in the Pocket would believe the explanation, but that didn't matter. We were symbols now, no longer in control of our own stories.

Then the feeling passed and I felt all right. I loved them both, but neither Abe nor my mother had any purchase on me. They could say what they liked, and I would love them still, but I would not change my behavior, would not change my mind.

How am I still making stupid mistakes in my eighties? Whenever somebody says to me, Maybe it'll come with age, I want to say, 'I wouldn't count on it.