Stephen Hunter > Quotes

“You’re a genius,” she said. “Hardly,” he said. “I just show up and pay attention.”
― Stephen Hunter, Sniper's Honor

“The worst moment was always taps. It didn’t matter if the bugler played it well or poorly, in tune or out; there was something in the mournful ache of the music, and how it spoke of men dying before their time for something they only vaguely understood and being only vaguely appreciated by the people on whose behalf they died, that made it hurt so much.”
― Stephen Hunter, Dirty White Boys

“These in the day when heaven was falling, when earth’s foundations fled, followed their mercenary calling, took their wages and are dead.”
― Stephen Hunter, Dead Zero

“Some are born jerks” she said, “some have jerkhood thrust upon them, and some mature into rich and vibrant jerks. You are all three.”
― Stephen Hunter, Dead Zero

“As I said, the good die young, and the motherfuckers go on forever, pardon my French.”
― Stephen Hunter, Sniper's Honor

“Okay,” he said, “I’m going in.” He turned to Swagger. “Sorry, old guy. A world where she dies so I can survive isn’t a world I choose to live in.”
― Stephen Hunter, Dead Zero

“A man may lie to his psychiatrist, his doctor, his wife, his employer, to God and to Mom, but his teeth tell all;”
― Stephen Hunter, Point of Impact

“Yeats said, ‘Men of action, when they lose all belief, believe only in action.”
― Stephen Hunter, The 47th Samurai

“Our Director had a vision, Sheriff Swagger. He envisioned a scientific national police force, incorruptible, untainted by ego, vanity, and politics. Alas, as we have learned, that also meant untainted by experience, toughness, cunning, and marksmanship. Lawyers make poor gunfighters.”
― Stephen Hunter, G-Man

“I spent my life trying to get out of Oklahoma because I was too good for Oklahoma. Then I got to the Ivy League and the people seemed to be so, you know, little. They were fundamentally bigots. They”
― Stephen Hunter, Black Light

“He wanted to get away: this was like something out of Faulkner or Penn Warren, blasphemed southern ground, soaked in blood a generation old, white trash and black, white innocence and black, all commingled in a very small area on the same day.”
― Stephen Hunter, Black Light

“Your idealism will get you killed or, worse, knighted, and you’ll spend the rest of your days among fools and MPs. As for me, the chance to refuse an audience with the queen would be exquisite.”
― Stephen Hunter, I, Ripper: A Novel

“You are the most contrary man I ever met. If someone handed you a glass of free beer that was nine-tenths full, you’d cry over the missing tenth.”
― Stephen Hunter, Point of Impact

“What he called his own personal night was about the feeling of being nothing, of having no worth, of having spent himself in a war nobody cared about, and having given up everything that was important and good.”
― Stephen Hunter, Point of Impact

“But shooting a man takes one of two things: an overwhelming fear of one’s own death, which Nick did not have in the least; or conviction. It turned out he lacked this component as well.”
― Stephen Hunter, Point of Impact

“I was in a delirium of destruction, as if the body were an insult to the philosophy of my life, and only in destroying it could I reclaim my sanity.”
― Stephen Hunter, I, Ripper

“And then there are the Germans. Do you know, they form words by just sticking them together, so that their word for ‘Gatling gun’ literally translates into ‘mechanicaldeviceshootingwithoutcockingrifle?’ The words get longer still. No word is too long for a German because it’s quite impossible to bore a German. You cannot entertain a Norwegian, you cannot bore a German, and you cannot educate an American or a chimpanzee.”
― Stephen Hunter, I, Ripper: A Novel

“The public library was more accommodating;”
― Stephen Hunter, The Third Bullet

“I would advise you never to use the W-word today. The W-word is why. Sometimes there is no why, and if you get hung up on why, you lose your effectiveness. I’ve seen it happen. The men who die are the men who can’t believe they’re in a fight and can’t believe that someone is trying to kill them. It seems so unfair to them and they’re so busy feeling sorry for themselves, they don’t seek cover, they don’t return fire, they don’t scan the horizon, they forget how to use their expensive equipment. The men who live get it right away; they understand they’re in a different world and they have to deal with exactly what is before them with maximum concentration.”
― Stephen Hunter, Soft Target

“You know that easy money, stupid people, and hard times have a way of creating misery.”
― Stephen Hunter, Night of Thunder

“There is a paradox at the core of penology, and from it derives the thousand ills and afflictions of the prison system. It is that not only the worst of the young are sent to prison, but the best—that is, the proudest, the bravest, the most daring, the most enterprising and the most undefeated of the poor. There starts the horror. —Norman Mailer’s introduction to In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man.”
― Stephen Hunter, Dirty White Boys

“Bob,” she said, “I love you so and want you with me, but you are lying to me, and you are lying to yourself. I can hear it in your voice, and if you don’t get it settled in a way that satisfies you, it will suck the pleasure out of the peace you’ve earned. I know you. You are samurai, dog soldier, marine fool, crazy bastard, marshal of Dodge, commando, the country-western Hector. You are all of those things. They are your nature. The girls and I are just where you park when you’re not warring. You love us, yes you do, but war is your life, it’s your destiny, it’s your identity. My advice, old man, is win your war. Then come home. Or maybe you’ll get killed. That would be a shame and a tragedy, and the girls and I will weep for years. But that is the way of the warrior and we have the curse upon us of loving the last of them.”
― Stephen Hunter, I, Sniper

“If they’s interested, they wouldn’t believe it. If they believed it, they’d arrest me.”
― Stephen Hunter, G-Man

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
― Stephen Hunter, Sniper's Honor

“In those days, the South was being prepared for the civil rights movement, which no matter what you might think, did not spring out of nowhere. For a decade, very brave young black ministers and young white volunteers traveled from church to church, where they tried to prepare the people for the dangerous work ahead.”
― Stephen Hunter, Black Light

“Because I'm too old for tragedy. I like a nice happy ending too.”
― Stephen Hunter, Point of Impact

“I deal in lead, friend.”
― Stephen Hunter, Point of Impact

“The Americans, he laughed drunkenly. They build more cars than anybody in the world, and take them out and dump them in terrible traffic jams. The only thing crazier than the Americans were the Russians, who never had traffic jams because they didn’t have cars.”
― Stephen Hunter, The Day Before Midnight: A Novel

“The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide ‘These are the lies we tell today.’ No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was fucked up, torture never works, and mad Vietnam sniper Carl Hitchcock killed the saintly peace demonstrators. Cheney’s a devil, Biden’s a genius. Soft power good,”
― Stephen Hunter, I, Sniper

“Son, I don’t think you understand. These boys killed my dog.”
― Stephen Hunter, Point of Impact