“She'd say amazing things sometimes. "Once you're alive," she'd say, "you cant ever be dead.”

“you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.”

“One morning in Saigon she'd asked what it was all about 'This whole war,' she said, 'why was everybody so mad at everybody else?'I shook my head. 'They weren't mad exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing.''What did you want?''Nothing,' I said. 'To stay alive.''That's all?''Yes.”

“Once someone's dead you can't make them undead.”

“Still there was so much to say. How the rain never stopped. How the cold worked into your bones. Sometimes the bravest thing on earth was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones. Courage was not always a matter of yes or no. Sometimes it came in degrees, like the cold; sometimes you were very brave up to a point and then beyond that point you were not so brave. In certain situations you could do incredible things, you could advance toward enemy fire, but in other situations, which were not nearly so bad, you had trouble keeping your eyes open. Sometimes, like that night in the shit field, the difference between courage and cowardice was something small and stupid.”

“In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.”

“But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.”