“Its Friday! High Five!”

“People make mistakes, it's just part of life. But, it's what we do with those mistakes that matters. What matters is what we learn from the mistakes, not what the mistake is.”

“The gasoline flowing through the pump made a high pitched sound, as if the screaming of my family was still dissolved in it" [p.181].”

“The movies, I thought, have got the soundtrack to war all wrong. War isn't rock 'n' roll. It's got nothing to do with Jimi Hendrix or Richard Wagner. War is nursery rhymes and early Madonna tracks. War is the music from your childhood. Because war, when it's not making you kill or be killed, turns you into an infant. For the past eight days, I'd been living like a five-year-old — a nonexistence of daytime naps, mushy food, and lavatory breaks. My adult life was back in Los Angeles with my dirty dishes and credit card bills.”

“Not for the first time, he wished he commanded a highly trained bunch of soldiers instead of a ragtag mob of rejects in varying stages of alcoholism.”

“We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven.”

“High School. Society’s bright idea to put all their aggressive, naive youth into one environment to torment and emotionally scar each other for life.”