Phillip > Phillip's Quotes

“Billy lit a cigarette with a brand from the fire and laid the brand back He smoked. It looks a lot better from up here than it doesn down there, dont it?
Yes. It does.
There's a lot of things look better at a distance.
Yeah?
I think so.
I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one.
Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

“She looks like her face caught fire and they beat it out with a rake”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

“Cynicism is no more mature than naïveté. You're no more mature, just more burned.”
― Karl Marlantes, What It is Like to Go to War

“There it is.”
― Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn

“Victory in combat is like sex with a prostitute. For a moment you forget everything in the sudden physical rush, but then you have to pay your money to the woman showing you the door. You see the dirt on the walls and your sorry image in the mirror.”
― Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn

“He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn’t evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.”
― Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn

“Emotion constricted Hawke’s throat. He suddenly understood why the victims of concentration camps had walked quietly to the gas chambers. In the face of horror and insanity, it was the one human thing to do. Not the noble thing, not the heroic thing—the human thing. To live succumbing to the insanity, was the ultimate loss of pride.”
― Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn

“Being human was the best he could do. Without man there would be no evil. But there was also no good, nothing moral built over the world of fact. Humans were responsible for it all.”
― Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn

“On the other hand, looking careless could just be privileged give-a-shit Ivy League attitude, like wearing duct tape on loafers and jeans with holes in them, knowing all along that they were headed straight to Wall Street or Washington and three-piece suits.”
― Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn