“He had illuminated the heartbreaking cruelty of war: When men who fight become nothing, only packages of bones and blood deposited in the earth with no clarion call to memory, those they love are left without a way to make such devastating loss hold meaning.”

“The women who went to the field, you say... A few names were writ, and by chance live to-day;But's a perishing record fast fading away,Of those we recall, there are scarcely a score...And what would they do if war came again?...They would stand with you now, as they stood with you then,The nurses, consolers, and saviors of men.”

“...brooding only feeds the strange pleasure of melancholy...”

“I was seeing what a writer can do with the tatters of truth, the unfinished stories that give us no rest. ”

“I continued up the stairs, this time on wings, suspecting for the first time that Louisa's book might outlive us all. ”

“Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

“When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.”