“On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm's bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.”

“Normally Halloween was like Christmas for me. I would anticipate it for weeks, decorating myself and the house, as well as strolling around the neighborhood, admiring everyone else's decorations. Nothing lifts my spirit like a scarecrow in the front yard.”

“It was the beginning of the war. I was twelve years old, my parents were alive, and God still dwelt in our town.”

“I'm a year older than 365 days ago, and I'm having trouble bending my knees and my lower back is killing me. Everything reminds me of death. Especially bending over all day to steal the flowers off all the graves in the cemetery.”

“Love is like a forest, I think as I kill trees by squandering toilet paper while “decorating” my ex girlfriend’s front yard.”

“That's my town,' Joaquin said. 'What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.' Then, his face grave, 'There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.' 'What barbarians,' Robert Jordan said. How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, 'What barbarians.”