You'll notice by the sheer number of quotes here that my inclination was to underline and transcribe the entire book. I came this close. In the end, I settled for the following.
“I came across this ocean and died. They might as well bring back my bones. I’m all different.” P12
“This world spits out a beautiful man like was poison.” P15
“Let your doubt be your calling. Then your doubt will be invisible. You’ll inhabit it like an atmosphere.” P21
He spoke as if he were teaching. As if nobody ever learned anything. P23
Hao made out the colonel’s intent, and, Yes, he wanted to agree, it’s all simply water coursing into larger and the still larger seas, and only what we do in this moment can save us… His vocabularly allowed him to say, “It’s true. I think so. Yes.” P24
Listening for his murderers. P27
It had been long enough since he’d stopped attending classes that he didn’t know anymore what he was saying. P 29
Look at you, he thought, from your births to your deaths only exile, wandering, war. P30
In fact he was no longer persuaded that blood and revolution made useful tools for altering the concepts in a person’s mind. Who said it? – probably Confucius- “I can’t beat a sculpture from a stone with a sledgehammer; I can’t free the soul of a man by violence.” Peace was here, peace was now. Peace promised in any other time or place was a lie. P32
“These people are like demented children.” P42
“War is ninety percent myth anyway, isn’t it? In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don’t we, and we constantly invoke our God. It’s got to be about something bigger than dying, or we’d all turn deserter. I think we need to be much more conscious of that. I think we need to be invoking the other fellow’s gods too. And his devils, his aswang. He’s more scared of his gods and his devils and his aswang than he’ll ever be of us.” P54
“I’m religious about my cigars. Otherwise… religion? No. It’s more than religion. It’s the goddamn truth.” P56
“It’s Armageddon by proxy.” P57
“Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t the goddamn Alamo. This is a fallen world.” P57
“I’m a patriot. I believe in liberty and justice for all. I’m not sophisticated anough to be ashamed of that.” P57
“Eddie Aguinaldo,” the colonel said, “is the Filipino equivalent of a goddamn liar. Any other questions?” p59
The colonel said, “I went to Alaska once, you know. I toured the Alaska-Canada road they built there during the war. Fantastic. Not the road, the landscape. The mighty road was just this insignificant little scratch across that landscape. You’ve never seen a world like that. It belongs to the God who was God before the Bible… God before he woke up and saw himself… God who was his own nightmare. There is no forgiveness there. You make one tiny mistake and that landscape grinds you into a bloody smudge, and I do mean right now, sir.” P63
“St. Paul says there is one God, he confirms that, but he says, ‘There is one God, and many administrations.’ I understand that to mean you can wander out of one universe and into another just by pointing your feet and forward march. I mean you can come to a land where the fate of human beings is completely different from what you understood it to be. And this utterly different universe is administered through the earth itself. Up through the dirt, goddman it.” P63
His love for his country, his homeland, was a love for the United States of America in the summertime. P65
Did he realize? He’d offered his nickname. Trouble would never touch him again in this town. P82
She wasn’t steady, and he expected her to fall off into the dark. P98
The dry season hadn’t come yet, but it didn’t rain. P99
But good or bad, a strong man causes trouble. P107
The visitor, sitting on the bench among them in his khaki pants, his dirty white T-shirt, shone forth as if he were the last American, sincere, friendly, a close listener, but at the very center of his eyes a terrified loneliness. P111
“You can put me on a nice clean desert anytime you want to. It’s honest heat there, ain’t it? It’s dry and burning.” P122
She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her. P139
Skip stared at the ranks of the players. Men who raced from the benches to collide with one another in joyful bloodshed. Who let themselves be hammered and rounded into cops and warriors and lived in a world completely inaccessible to women and children. They stared back at him. An old ache sang its song. Only child of a widowed mother. Somehow he’d entered their world without becoming a man. P155 (while staring at a photo of notre dame football players)
More grown-up, but not in a good way; instead in a way that reminded him of middle age. P166
He rushed through an hour like a physical thing, a hallway. P166
War and war and war like a series of typhoons against their lives, and now, on the other side of it all, a distant peak of safety, a place to travel toward. P178
He’d always had a dogged sincereity, but this was deeper. His silences were searches. They were inspiring. “There’s been a lie told. I’ve told it. I’m going to let truth reclaim me. If I can’t survive that process, so be it.” P181
Why hadn’t he know he could hurt this giant? So ignorant of these older men: Why don’t I have a father? P185
“Philosphical obsessions win wars.” P188
“Did you graduate?”
“Fuck no,” Jimmy said. “Do I look like a graduate of anything?” p191
“Is this an interrogation?” the colonel said. “Then let’s have cocktails.” P193
“The land is their myth. We penetrate the land, we penetrate their national soul.” P194
“It’s obscene-isn’t it obscene?-to take something that reaches down and rips at your heart, and call it a ‘domestice dispute.’” P195
He was like that, that’s all, mostly when he drank, which was most of the time; otherwise he was just mostly young and mostly stupid, like most of the rest of them. P219
Recovering to the third dimension the flattened cardboard boxes. P228
Sometimes he heard distant choppers, fighters, bombers, and felt himself captured in a rainbow bubble of irrelevance. P231
“Come on,” Evans said, “we’re in a war. We’re men.” P235
Now that he’d come to where the humidity was awful and the beer cheap and infinite, he really understood beer’s meaning and its purpose. P236
“Believe it or not, I like it better here. In this country there’s nothing left but the truth.” P240
May Christ stay his feet till the last soul on earth be saved. The last soul saved might be one of her boys. Of that there was every indication. P260
Prayer was all she had. Prayer and Nescafe and Salems. This was the only time of day she didn’t feel crazy. P260
“The people’s thirst for freedom has driven us to drink bad water.” P264
He’d concluded that wanting something was generally less painful than hauling it. P282
They were glad to hear Hanson’s voice talking about this very moment as if it could be understood and maybe even survived. P287
But now this big-headed, half-faced tragic miracle stuck in the breach, coming out already ravaged by the strife. P288
And Minh often felt of the Americans that behind their actions lay no thoughts anyway, only passions. P299
“When the world ends, and Jesus comes down in a cloud of glory and all that shit, it’ll be the second most incredible thing that ever happened to me. Because I will remember that night at the Purple Bar.” P310
“Meanwhile, I’m a pogue. Reading Dickens, as you know.”
“And Ian Ian Fleming. Sorry I couldn’t get the Tolstoy.”
“Anything big and fat, or full of suave secret agents.”
“Have you read Shell Scott?”
“Sure. You mean the series. Richard S. Prather.”
“What about Mickey Spillane?”
“Everything. A dozen times.”
“Henry Miller?”
“Can you get Henry Miller?”
“He’s legal now. He went to court. I’ll get you Henry Miller.”
“Get me Tropic of Capricorn. I’ve read Tropic of Cancer.”
“I didn’t like Cancer. Boring. Capricorn’s really good.”
“Wow. I didn’t know you stayed so current.” P339
Skip felt his mouth hanging open as he regarded his uncle--drunk, obsolete--absolutely unkillable. P342
Cherry Loot told Sergeant Burke, “I’m gonna make the best of this fuck-a-monkey show. Don’t mean fuck to me if it’s illegal, unjustified, and sinful. Today we’re heroes, tomorrow we’re the Nazis. You never know. Nobody on this ball knows shit.” P346
The Cherry Loot didn’t seem the least bit cherry. He didn’t know what country he was in, but he was at home in the universe. P346
In the glory of war, in the bliss of combat, in the truth of war we see that might makes right. And that our respect for principles is based on eloquence and superstition. P356
He’d passed three weeks in the Phoenix lockup awaiting trial on a charge of assault and found nothing behind bars to complain about. They served you three meals there and the people were decent—criminals, maybe, but sober and well-fed criminals didn’t behave too badly. Anywhere but his mother’s house. Her zealous hope of Heaven made it hell there. P358
Did he need a lawyer? He doubted it. The woman had burned her way into his heart, but two weeks hardly counted. He didn’t intend to complicate the adventure with a divorce. P359
With all that had come along to disillusion him, the dismal realities of his work, it lit up his heart to be called a “spy.” P360
These were the thoughts that ravaged him as he tried to figure out how to deal with his overwhelming happiness and lust, his buzzing fingertips, clenched heart, dizziness. Not that he thought she’d mind a pass, but she was nuts—at the very least complicated—hidden-wounded, phony-cynical, overpassionate. Definitely angry. P364
(In regards to sex:) As in the time in Damulog, they didn’t speak. Everything they did was a secret, especially from each other. P365
She wasn’t, herself, beautiful. Her moments were beautiful. P366
“Disaster’s just around the corner. For a lot of people it’s already here. It’s a terrible, terrible situation. You get used to it and plod along, then one day you wake up and you’re not used to it anymore. Then after a while you get used to it all over again.” P367
Then remorse crushed him physically, the blood pounded in his head, he struggled for breath—he hadn’t called, hadn’t written, left her to ride to her death on a gurney all alone in helplessly polite apologetic Midwestern confusion and fear. P395
He didn’t want her, but something like this was necessary. He’d learned on these operations that he came as a predator, he must violate the land, he must prey upon its people, he must commit some small crime in propitiation of the gods of darkness. Then they’d let him enter. P408
“We are absolutely thoroughly prepared for one year ago.” P409
“And—Dirk.”
“Yes, Charles.”
“It’s a war. Go ahead and use a gun.” P424
Skip was aware of feeling as a child before an adult—before his mother, for instance, in her fits of loneliness—of wanting only to get through the moment, waiting to hear, That’s all, you can go, waiting for an end to this violating intimacy. P428
“So one minute I want to be a natural woman, and ten seconds after I’ve been one, behaved like one, I want to run away to God. Whom I don’t like that much, I like you better.” P436
Without the fact of the colonel looming between his sight and these Americans, they stood up clearly as empty, confused, sincere, stupid—infant monsters carrying loaded weapons. The idea that they fought on anyone’s side was foolish. P438
To be outsiders had made them close as only children are close, without any sense that time could shake them loose from one another. P442
Skip preferred the myth. It told the truth. P450
But I entered a land where my mother was dead and all others pretended not to be. My legs carried me over the mountain, but I never got home. P467
A few days later sorrow attacked him again as he realized the old man was still dead. As if some part of him had believed his father could die and later one could visit him and talk about it. P473
Fest resented that the scenario seemed to center on the cleanup operation rather than on the actual killing. P475
Well, you were sad about the kids for a while, for a month, two months, three months. You’re sad about the kids, sad about the animals, you don’t do the women, you don’t kill the animals, but after that you realize this is a war zone and everybody here lives in it. You don’t care whether these people live or die tomorrow, you don’t care whether you yourself live or die tomorrow, you kick the children aside, you do the women, you shoot the animals. P504
The mission had made sense until it had been accomplished. P513
There was a line. He’d bully young kids and he’d steal from them, he might even have stabbed one if he’d had to. But he’d never deal drugs. P517
“Right there I kind of agree with you, James. I don’t really think it’s highly advisable to turn you loose on the United States. I’d say keep you right here till you get killed. But if it ain’t bass-ackwards, it ain’t the U.S. Army, is it?” p523
He was pretty sure he would eventually shoot the woman living across the way but he felt there was nothing any human power could do about it. P527
Patterson explained that robbing a casino out in the desert, in the night, would have some of the quality of warfare. James said, “All right.” P529
But he enjoyed losing, enjoyed a sort of righteous lethargy while he curled in a ball and somebody kicked him in the head and back and legs, enjoyed lying with his face in his own blood while voices cried, “Stop it! That’s enough! You’re killing him! You’re killing him!” because they were wrong. They hadn’t come anywhere close to killing him. P538
There was no use carrying a gun. You were always outnumbered. P565
The rain stopped. It didn’t matter—sweat or rain, he’d be wet. P565
Somewhere along the odyssey of years he’d negotiated a crossing without acknowledging its keeper or paying its necessary tribute. You don’t recognize these entities for what they are until after the crossing. Until after the dissemblances dissolve. P591
“Here in this area, where the trees are so tall, where the vehicles cannot come, where no one comes, this area is quite different. God is dealing with them differently in this area.” P593
She suddenly remembered a time when the question of her own survival hadn’t interested her even marginally. That glorious time. P597
“Once upon a time there was a war.” P602
He was impressive at a glance. Prowess, a word she’d never used, came immediately to mind. Dangerous, but not to women and children. That type. P610
And Kathy reflected, certainly not for the first time, that the war hadn’t been only and exclusively terrible. It had delivered a sense, at first dreadful, eventually intoxicating, that something wild, magical, stunning might come from the next moment, death itself might erupt from the fabric of this very breath, unmasked as a friend; and she mourned the passing of a time when, sitting in a C-5A Galaxy airplane as it bounced into paddies suddenly as solid as rock, hearing the aluminum fuselage tear itself into jags and swords, she’d pitied only the children around her and regretted only the failure to get them out of the war, when breaking her own legs had meant not shock or pain, but only bitterness that she couldn’t help the others. P612
SPOILER ALERT. The final paragraph of the book (which, if you plan on reading this book, I beg you not to read the last paragraph here because how much more powerful and fulfilling it is when at the end of such a long journey) is thus:
She sat in the audience thinking—someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone’s soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can’t remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose bones will break sooner or later, people who’ve ruined their health, worshipped their own lies, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved. P614
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