“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.”

“Length of service: one year or duration of war. Duration of war, of course. He didn't want to spend a whole year in the army.”

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

“We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies?”

“... 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.”

“If we are all alive ten years hence, let's meet, and see how many of us have got our wishes, or how much nearer we are then than now.”

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”