Joe Haldeman > Quotes

“Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”
― Joe Haldeman

“The 1143-year-long war hand begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate.

Once they could talk, the first question was 'Why did you start this thing?' and the answer was 'Me?”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“Reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“There's no such thing as writing about the future. The future hasn't happened yet.”
― Joe Haldeman

“Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“Science fiction as a genre has the benefit of being able to act as parable, to set up a story at a remove so you can make a real-world point without people throwing up a wall in front of it.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and materiel. Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy’s information, political postures—dozens, literally dozens of factors.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“But love, he said, love was a fragile blossom; love was a delicate crystal; love was an unstable reaction with a half-life of about eight months. Bullshit, I said, and accused him of wearing cultural blinders; thirty centuries of prewar society taught that love was one thing that could last to the grave and even beyond and if he had been born instead of hatched he would know that without being told!”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“So here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging elitely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“He's asleep in the harbor, disguised as dog shit.”
― Joe Haldeman, Thieves' World

“I never found anybody else and I don’t want anybody else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. If I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“Bad books on writing tell you to 'write what you know', a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”
― Joe Haldeman

“People had written about that, warfare based on attrition of wealth rather than loss of life. But it's always been easier to make new lives than new wealth.”
― Joe Haldeman, Forever Peace

“But they weren’t aliens, I had to remind myself — we were.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“Politicians cover their mistakes with money; cooks cover their mistakes with mayonnaise; doctors cover theirs with dirt.”
― Joe Haldeman, Marsbound

“Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.”
― Joe Haldeman

“In the few moments I lay awake after finally lying down, the thought came to me that the next time I closed my eyes could well be the last. And partly because of the drug hangover, mostly because of the past day’s horrors, I found that I really didn’t give a shit.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“I'm not quite Machiavellian enough to set him up, but if he strays too close to the edge I might give him a nudge.”
― Joe Haldeman, Starbound

“heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“I called to the waiter, ‘bring me one of those Antares things.’ Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“I tried to get through to my brother, Mike, on the Moon, but the phone company wouldn’t let me place the call until I had signed a contract and posted a $25,000 bond.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“Saul's vitals were not human, but familiar:
he never told me he was from another world:
I never told him I was from his future. ”
― Joe Haldeman

“A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.”
― Joe Haldeman

“Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“Most of us didn’t feel too enthusiastic about making a collapsar jump, either. We’d been assured that we wouldn’t even feel it happen, just free fall all the way. I wasn’t convinced. As a physics student, I’d had the usual courses in general relativity and theories of gravitation. We only had a little direct data at that time — Stargate was discovered when I was in grade school — but the mathematical model seemed clear enough. The collapsar Stargate was a perfect sphere about three kilometers in radius. It was suspended forever in a state of gravitational collapse that should have meant its surface was dropping toward its center at nearly the speed of light. Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there … the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted. At any rate, there would be a theoretical point in space-time when one end of our ship was just above the surface of the collapsar, and the other end was a kilometer away (in our frame of reference). In any sane universe, this would set up tidal stresses and tear the ship apart, and we would be just another million kilograms of degenerate matter on the theoretical surface, rushing headlong to nowhere for the rest of eternity or dropping to the center in the next trillionth of a second. You pays your money and you takes your frame of reference. But they were right. We blasted away from Stargate 1, made a few course corrections and then just dropped, for about an hour.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“Anyone who sees clearly sees chaos everywhere. Art is a way of temporarily setting order to confusion. Temporary and incomplete; that’s why we never run out of new art. Anyone who comes to the tools of art without that sense of confusion is an invader.”
― Joe Haldeman, Worlds

“This world was no place for anyone with access to another.”
― Joe Haldeman, Worlds