Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.
If you can't be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.
Organization seemed to be the key.
The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again.
The loonies who sought a glorious death in battle found it very early on. This rapidly cleared the chain of command of the accumulated fools.
All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, or an independent business creator. In the service of their goals they lay down time and energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves.
Reading is an active and elusive experience. Every reader, reading exactly the same text, will have a slightly different reading experience depending on what s/he projects into the words s/he sees, what strings of meaning and association those words call up in his/her (always) private mind.
I suppose my determination to be a soldier stems from that date.
The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future.
They weren't supermen, or immune to pain. They sweated in confusion and darkness. And … they won.
Most people go through their whole lives without killing anybody. False argument.
Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?
Leadership is mostly a power over imagination, and never more so than in combat.
His mother had often said, "When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action."
Which is just a fancy way of saying, "I think about it a lot, day and night."
Adulthood isn’t an award they’ll give you for being a good child.
If you're trying to keep it a secret, Miles, why are you going around telling everyone"?
Acting or reacting, we carry him in us. You can't walk away from him any more than I can. Whether you travel toward or away, he'll be the compass.
Be passionate, be picky, have enough self-criticism to demand of yourself your best and not sort of let it slide by. And remember that the greatest defect any piece of fiction can have is not to be finished.
The trick is to try and know as much as possible.
