Quotes About War

The war that killed your grandfather killed sixteen million others. One and a half million French boys alone, most of them younger than I was. Two million on the German side. March the dead in a single-file line, and for eleven days and eleven nights, they'd walk past our door.

Out here the prisoners see the shells smash into the city before they hear them. During the last war, Etienne knew artillerymen who could peer through field glasses and discern their shells' damage by the colors thrown skyward. Gray was stone. Brown was soil. Pink was flesh.

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

In the stories after the war, all the resistance heroes were dashing, sinewy types who could construct machine guns from paperclips. And the Germans either raised their godlike blond heads through open tank hatches to watch broken cities scroll past, or else were psychopathic, sex-crazed torturers of beautiful Jewesses. Where did the boy fit in? He made such a faint presence. It was like being in the room with a feather. But his soul glowed with some fundamental kindness, didn't it?

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled.

Number 4: the tall, derelict bird's nest of a house owned by her great-uncle Etienne. Where she has lived for four years. Where she kneels on the sixth floor alone, as a dozen American bombers roar toward her.

He takes her hand to help her over the piles. No shells fall and no rifles crack and the light is soft and shot through with ash. Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened.

It's 1940 and no one laughs at the Hitler Youth now.

Marie-Laure sits among them, wondering who will cave, who will tattle, who will be the bravest. Who will lie on her back and let her last breath curl up to the ceiling as a curse upon the invaders.

The soldiers throw a bag over whomever they want to remove, run electricity through him, and then that person is gone, vanished. Expelled to some other world.

Anthony Doerr

Volkheimer is gone; there are stories that he has become a fearsome sergeant in the Wehrmacht. That he led a platoon into the last town on the road to Moscow. Hacked off the fingers of dead Russians and smoked them in a pipe.

Gulls pass, braying like donkeys, and in the distance the guns thud again, and the rattling of the truck fades, and Marie-Laure tries to concentrate on rereading a chapter earlier in the novel: make the raised dots form letters, the letters words, the words a world.

her shoes. The world seems to sway gently back and forth, as though the town is drifting lightly away. As though back onshore, all of France is left to bite its fingernails and flee and stumble and weep and wake to a numb, gray dawn, unable to believe what is happening. Who do the roads

She promises Etienne she will remember her age, not try to be everything to everyone, not fight the war by herself.

Especially during wartime, such things remain important. They are what separate the civilized man from the barbarian.

Bernd molders in the corner. Jutta moves through the world somewhere, watching shadows disentangle themselves from night, watching minders limp past in the dawnn. It was enough when Werner was a boy, wasn't it? A world of wildflowers blooming up through the shapes of rusty cast-off parts. A world of berries and carrot peels ad Frau Elena's fairy tales. Of the sharp smell of tar, and trains passing, and a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams.

During the last war, Etienne knew artillerymen who could peer through field glasses and discern their shells' damage by the colors thrown skyward. Gray was stone. Brown was soil. Pink was flesh.

from Volkheimer to Werner.

Bright spring clouds cruise above them like vessels sailing to a parallel war...

This look?" Bastian says, and flourishes his fat hand. "The way he's got nothing left? A German soldier never reaches this point. There's a name for this look. It's

Each time Marie-Laure relays another rumor to her father, he repeats "Germany" with a question mark after it, as if saying it for the very first time. He says the takeover of Austria is nothing to worry about. He says everyone remembers the last war, and no one is mad enough to go through that again.

Tre ragazzi passano ridendo e Max li guarda con intensità. Su un muro butterato e chiazzato di licheni è fissata una piccola lapide di pietra. <>Ici a été tuè Buy Gaston Marcel agé de 18 ans, mort pour la France le 11 aout 1944. Jutta si siede per terra. Il mare è gonfio, grigio d'ardesia. Non ci sono lapidi per i tedeschi morti qui.

The war drops its question mark.