Top 113 Quotes & Sayings by Phil Klay - Page 2

It's very strange getting out of the military, when you've lived in Iraq, and people you know are going overseas again and again. Some of them are getting injured.

The Iraq I returned from was, in my mind, a fairly simple place. By which I mean it had little relationship to reality. It's only with time and the help of smart, empathetic friends willing to pull through many serious conversations that I've been able to learn more about what I witnessed.

I suppose it is the lot of soldiers and Marines to be objectified according to the politics of the day and the mood of the American people about their war.

Prayer in a combat zone serves exactly the same purpose as it does in peacetime. In war, the stakes are life and death, true; but if you believe in God and in the notion of a human soul, then we are always making decisions of tremendous significance.

If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.

In the Marine Corps, you meet this really broad segment of the country; you're working with people from all kinds of backgrounds. And it exposes you to the American military, particularly the American military at war.

For me, leaving the Marine Corps was more disorienting than returning home.

I like the ethos of the military and the idea of joining an institution in which, at the very least, everyone who signs up believes in something.

You're not supposed to risk your life just for the physical safety of American citizens - you're supposed to risk your life for American ideals as well.

I literally went straight to New York City from Iraq, which was bizarre and complicated. I was walking down Madison Avenue, and it was spring, and people were smartly dressed, and it was so strange because there was no sense that we were at war. It was something to grapple with.

The First Battle of Fallujah was called off in part because of the intensity of non-U.S. media coverage of civilian casualties from outlets like Al Jazeera.

The civilian wants to respect what the veteran has gone through. The veteran wants to protect memories that are painful and sacred to him from outside judgment.

Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite.

Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking.

Responsibility and accountability is a big part of being in the military.

We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific.

Even if torture works, what is the point of 'defending' America using a tactic that is a fundamental violation of what America ought to mean?

Going to war is a rare experience in American culture, so it's easy for simple notions to gain a lot of weight. The reality is always more complex.

I think that just because you've been through an experience doesn't make you the ultimate arbiter of what it means. We figure things out; we work things out through the help of other people who can engage with us but also be intelligently critical.

It's often difficult to get perspective on your own stories, on your own experiences, without talking them through with someone who is genuinely interested in thinking about them. And that's the key.

After the fighting is done, and even when it's still happening, apologies are often needed for the recounting of bare facts. Sometimes bare facts feel unpatriotic.

People lie to themselves all the time about what they've been through and what it means - I'm no exception. But you write those lies down - lies that really matter to you and that are really painful to let go of because they've become a part of who you are - and they don't work.

People should be able to tell stories that are important to them to try and understand what they mean. I don't think you figure anything out on your own. Certainly not war stories.

The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness.

I never thought anyone would pity me because of my time in the Marine Corps.

Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it.

I didn't want to write a 'this is how it is' Iraq book, because the Iraq War is an intensely complicated variety of things.

I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me.

Pity addresses the perceived suffering, not the whole individual.

The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went.

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.

War is too strange to process alone.

Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a liminal experience forever separating them from civilians. Except... you go there, and it is what it is. A form of human activity as varied as any other.

When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me.

In a strange way, you have to have a certain amount of distance from a thing in order to be able to write about it.

Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected.

There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that.

It's not so much the question that offends me; it's that the people asking it don't seem to respect the moral seriousness of the question.

Fiction is a place where people can meet, where they take the time to very seriously examine and think about the experiences of other people and about the sorts of moral decisions those characters are making.

And that was my homecoming. It was fine, I guess. Getting back feels like your first breath after nearly drowning. Even if it hurts, it's good.

The part of the strangeness of coming back from the war is the way we talk about it. We try to have a discussion about the war that doesn't turn into a discussion about one political side or the other. I wanted to reach out and talk to people about it through fiction, the way a narrative can draw someone in and ask them those questions.

War is too strange to be processed alone.

Fiction offered me tools that allowed me to approach a wider variety of issues than the events of my own life would.

I've worked hard to remember it...The problem is I'm not sure what's real memory and what's my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light. Except I'm sure of my bright light.

Part of the reason I'm writing it is to try to figure out what that is myself. It's not like I came back from Iraq and said, "We need to have a conversation, I know exactly what it is." It was just this sort of sense of something missing and then trying to write toward what that was, and to solicit from other people a sense of what that might be.

Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters.

Our country regularly uses military force, but only a fraction of Americans serve in the military. This means fewer and fewer people have a direct link to the military, and yet it remains as important as ever that we have a rich understanding of what we are doing as a country.

Veteran art creates a meeting place between veterans and civilians, or simply between veterans with different experiences.

There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of war they can't quite see. Either way, it's the same story.

Sin is a lonely thing, a worm wrapped around the soul, shielding it from love, from joy, from communion with fellow men and with God. The sense that I am alone, that none can hear me, none can understand, that no one answers my cries, it is a sickness over which, to borrow from Bernanos, “the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly.” Your job, it seems, would be to find a crack through which some sort of communication can be made, one soul to another.

I wrote some weird magical realism stories that are probably on some hard drive somewhere, and if I ever uncover that hard drive, I'll burn it. I tried to do a little bit of writing while I was in Iraq, but it wasn't the really greatest space for creative production.

I think in America, especially today, our relationship to war is incredible distant. Yet narratives of war have such a primal power in this culture. They mainline directly into a whole series of emotional reactions and understandings of American patriotism, masculinity, and all of these other things.