“The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple--hate your enemy, know nothing of him.”

“Now his children are getting old too, like him, and they have children and nobody wants the old man any more and they are waiting for him to die. But he don't want to die. He wants to keep on living even though he's so old and there's nothing to be happy about any more.”

“I don't know who the good guys are anymore. But I do know what the enemy is. It's the compromise of principles. You lose the war when you lose your principles. And the first principle is to look out for your comrades.”

“She wasn’t entertainment for him. Hedidn’t need her to make him laugh or bolster his ego or to figure him out so he wouldn’t have to. A lot of men who said they were looking for a relationship really wanted a combination sex buddy, therapist, and mirror.”

“I told him about the Oedipal thing, about my father leaving when I was very young so I knew how to pine for men, but not how to love them. So he said, 'You'd probably would have been perfect for somebody in World War Two. You'd meet him and then he would get shipped overseas.' And I said, 'Maybe on our date I could drop you off and you could enlist,' and he said he would just got out and rent a uniform. So he was very funny.”

“I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”