“Courage for the big troubles in life, lad' he'd say, 'and patience for the small. Be of good cheer. God is awake.”

“Last year we had many smallish hopes, made many smallish attempts, suffered many smallish failures, and we died one by one. This year a change of plan! One big hope, one big push, one big fuck-up, and we all die at once.”

“They did not talk about the larger present, so circumscribed, so uncontrollable. Their little present was two bodies and a bed, and that was the entirety of time and place: them, there, in their little room, awkward, laughing, happy, warm, tentative, surrendering, overwhelmed, alarmed, astounded, shivering, subsiding, asleep, awake, getting the hang of it, learning, loving, redeemed. Happy.”

“More talk of love would lead to the difficulties surrounding...Oh, God, he loved her, he did, she did, they did, it was.It was.”

“... what he could or couldn’t say to them. Everything he had to say: I love you, it’s hell, I walk on corpses and breathe death, it’s only a matter of time before I prove a coward, and I don’t want to be a coward, but I don’t understand, either I kill people, or I’m a coward, that’s the choice, someone somewhere set it up and I get no vote, I can’t say, ‘I don’t accept that’ – and I have accepted it, for a year I’ve accepted it, this is the situation but I don’t understand how I got here, how it is just going on and on, and nobody mentions it, and if you don’t like it they think you’re mad, and you get shot, for cowardice, desertion . . . and your own men, your companions, your brothers, have to shoot you . . . and I’m so fucking scared out there every day, every night— and now they’ve made me a fucking officer — What the fuck could he say to any of them? Well, there’ll be none of that swearing for a start.”

“Look how beautiful the green lawns of the park are in the misty evening light, unmuddied, smooth, alive, no holes, no bodies, no barbed wire, no explosions. Such a simple thing to be grateful for. No wrongness. Can no wrongness be enough to make rightness? God, no wrongness. No wrongness would be fucking marvellous.”

“They were completely happy. They couldn't stop smiling at each other, beaming like fools till their cheeks ached.”