“Dipsomancy is very real, but it takes more than just getting hammered to do anything useful.”

“Horror would not annoy a soldier any more than the sight of a hammer annoys a carpenter. It is sentimental to pretend that horror is not the tool of the soldier, just as the hammer is the tool of the carpenter. We live off death and the threat of death and we must take it calmly and use it well.... Eventually I came to enjoy killing, as a pianist enjoys the Czerny which keeps his fingers limber for the Beethoven.”

“I'm sure, you'll never again have a problem with a tool or a machine. No more hammered thumbs, no vacuum-cleaner catastrophes." "That'll take a second miracle." "Because all that clumsiness was never anything but an elaborate excuse not to have a gun, not to learn how to use one.”

“It’s not just a damn game. Whatever it is that I feel for you is more real than anything I’ve ever felt before.”

“One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge.”

“He couldn't seem to get his teeth into anything. Except books. The things in books was darn near more real to him than the things breathing and eating.”