“Organized force alone enables the quiet and the weak to go about their business and to sleep securely in their beds, safe from the violent without or within.”

“The surer of himself an admiral is, the finer the tactical development of his fleet, the better his captains, the more reluctant must he necessarily be to enter into a melee with equal forces, in which all these advantages will be thrown away, chance reign supreme, and his fleet be place on terms of equality with an assemblage of ships which have never before acted together.”

“Whether they will or not, Americans must now begin to look outward. The growing production of the country demands it.”

“The study of history lies at the foundation of all sound military conclusions and practice.”

“Trust me, I write fiction.”

“The unusual thing about quiet is that when you seek it, it is almost impossible to achieve. When you strive for quiet, you become impatient, and impatience is itself a noiseless noise. You can block every superficial sound, but, with each new layer extinguished, a next rises up, finer and more entrapping, until you arrive at last in the infinite attitude of your own riotous mind. Inside is where all the memories last like wells, and the unspoken wishes like golden buds, and the pain that you keep, lingering and implicit, staying inside, nesting inside, articulating, articulating, through to the day you die. (p. 240)”

“Hell is only loneliness, a place without play for the soul, a place without God. How could there be God in loneliness when God is presence?”