Robert Hicks > Quotes

“I wanted to leave the whole war behind me, and yet I was seeing something on that battlefield that demanded commemoration. It was unholy ground, but I wanted to thank God for showing it to me. I would never again look at a man without wondering what crimes he was capable of committing. That seemed important to know.”
― Robert Hicks, The Widow of the South

“Had the Battle of Franklin ever really ended? Carrie walked her cemetery, and around her the wounds closed up and scarred over, but only in that way that an oak struck by lightning heals itself by twisting and bending around the wound: it is still recognizably a tree, it still lives as a tree, it still puts out its leaves and acorns, but its center, hidden deep within the curtain of green, remains empty and splintered where it hasn't been grotesquely scarred over. We are happy the tree hasn't died, and from the proper angle we can look on it and suppose that it is the same tree as it ever was, but it is not and never will be.”
― Robert Hicks, The Widow of the South

“Through the late afternoon and into the evening, there were more casualties those five hours at Franklin than in the nineteen hours of D-Day—and more than twice as many casualties as at Pearl Harbor. There were moments so bloody and overwhelming that even the enemy wept. When a fourteen-year-old Missouri drummer boy—a mascot of Cockrell’s Brigade—charged up to a loaded and primed Ohio cannon and shoved a fence rail into its mouth, witnesses said the child turned into what was described as the “mist of a ripe tomato.”
― Robert Hicks, The Widow of the South

“The pieces of soul can't be cut out without filling them up again, that's a real law there. God's law. Can't cut out the pieces any more than you can go around with a big hole in your gut. Got to be plugged up, replaced somehow.”
― Robert Hicks, A Separate Country

“I ain’t much for advice. Never been any good with words the way some men are. But I know, sometimes the tears just don’t come. When the time comes to start healin’, you oughta let yourself.”
― Robert Hicks, The Orphan Mother

“Made me wonder whether putting names to time made much of a difference anyway. What did it measure? Not how much life passes. Hell no. Your whole life can pass and be changed in a second or in a century. Don’t matter.”
― Robert Hicks, The Widow of the South

“The only glory to be had was the glory of surviving.”
― Robert Hicks, The Widow of the South

“It would drive a man mad to apprehend the whole tragedy, to know every effect and consequence, to know the names of every good man and woman, every genius and every saint, who was never born because their lineage petered out there on that rise at Franklin.”
― Robert Hicks, The Widow of the South

“You can get so that every step, every little obstacle on the battlefield, becomes so big that you can’t see much past it, and when you do get past, it’s sometimes hard to remember what the hell you were supposed to be doing.”
― Robert Hicks, The Widow of the South

“You only had to be in one fight to know what a beautiful thing a trench could be. The first minié ball whizzes by your head, and you’re a digging man evermore.”
― Robert Hicks, The Widow of the South

“of lumbermen who called the town home, had only grudgingly returned from the”
― Robert Hicks, The Orphan Mother

“his head for him. “I’ll give you the one because we”
― Robert Hicks, The Orphan Mother

“at her home on Columbia Avenue on last Wednesday night removes from”
― Robert Hicks, The Orphan Mother

“Until I get the keys to the Kingdom, Lord, I ain't giving up.”
― Robert Hicks, The Widow of the South