Quotes About Reflection

Senior officers in First Army would spend the rest of their lives trying to explain the tactical logic behind the Hürtgen battle plan. "All we could do was sit back and pray to God that nothing would happen," General Thorson, the operations officer, later lamented. "It was a horrible business, the forest.… We had the bear by the tail, and we just couldn't turn loose.

Like any army moving from war to peace, this Army was entering a period in which it would search high and low for its soul. Only the vanquished truly learn anything from the last war, according to an ancient maxim, and the issue now confronting America was whether the defeated nation and the nation's vanquished Army would learn anything from Vietnam.

Brittany reflected an inflexible adherence to the OVERLORD plan. "We must take Brest in order to maintain the illusion of the fact that the U.S. Army cannot be beaten," Bradley told Patton, who agreed. The war ended with not a single cargo ship or troopship having berthed at Brest, which bombs and a half million American shells knocked to rubble.

I do not concern myself with my inability to feel such comfort amidst humans (other than with very few friends and family), but, rather, am simply thankful that at least dogs exist, and I'm humbly aware of how much less a person I'd be – how less a human – if they did not exist.

everyone has to do one really bad thing in life to call their life a life.

His errors and failures have not traveled the same distance as his successes.

My life, I realize suddenly, is July. Childhood is June, and old age is August, but here it is, July, and my life, this year, is July inside of July.   The

I think it may be fine to live in the past if that is where your people have all disappeared to - if that is a place where things still make some kind of sense to you.

I guess nostalgia is our sanctuary in sorry times.

If one piddles correctly, time just goes away, without regret on the part of the piddler, or even any particular notice.

dreaming backwards can carry a man through some dark rooms where the walls seem lined with razor blades.

I could not even ask myself how in the fuzzy hell I got here, because I knew precisely how it happened, year by year.

Finally, I must thank the boy, for forgiving me for all that I have fumbled, broken and lost, and the simple fact that, sometimes, I just don't have good sense.

They say a kitchen is the heart of a house, but I believe the porch is its soul.

because dreaming backwards can carry a man through some dark rooms...

He liked the cemetery. He told me once that it was where a man his age had to go to talk to anybody who could appreciate him.

Sometimes you put yourself in a place in your life when a dog is the best company you can have.

She passed November 25, 2002,' he said, pointing to a sepia-toned photo of them taken when they were still young. 'She was a wife to me, boy,' he said, and then he looked around the room, his eyes fierce, as if daring someone to disagree. He is asked if he has anything else to say about baseball, but he is lost now, in a place even the cheers cannot reach, cannot brighten.

Some men were just born beside a river of melancholy. Some men lived a lifetime there.

But I knew, as I staggered down that hill with that awful dog, what the unreliable men in my family have always known: that this ol' life can be a bleak, sorry, boring slog, if you take the time, at every turn, to think it through. { Three } Tough Guys The dog lay in the garage as I cleaned off the mud and old blood with a rag.

Passion is something you really don't miss, after it has cooled. It is like looking at an empty bottle on the side of the road and thinking, "Boy, I wish I had a Coke." The loves you miss are the ones that go away when they are still warm, even hot, to the touch.

You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot machine.

I believe that if we are going to write about life and death, we should not do it from the cheap seats.

Show them how their behavior is self-defeating. To create self-motivation for change, you have to show them how something important to them is lost because of their behavior.