“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”

“I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced...”

“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.”

“I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.”

“So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”

“My heart's broken,' he thought. 'If I feel this way my heart must be broken.”

“The war was a long way away. Maybe there wasn't any war. There was no war here. Then I realized it was over for me. But I did not have the feeling that it was really over. I had the feeling of a boy who thinks of what is happening at a certain hour at the schoolhouse from which he has played truant.”