Hannah

“His voice had a tremor in it, a tone of anguish. “I don’t even know how many I’ve done killed . . . least five or six. . . maybe more’n that . . . and I never wanted to kill nobody. Nobody.”
“Peter, you couldn’t help it. You did what you had to do, because you are a soldier, and this is a war, an awful, senseless, bloody war. When soldiers fight a war, they kill people. Because that is war.”
“But I’ll always wonder if they was just like me; they didn’t want to kill nobody neither. Somebody made them think killing me was their duty, and all . . . that them German fellas I killed was just fellas like me, not knowing what they was doing . . .just doing what they thought they was expected to do. Like I was.”
“Peter, the Germans started this awful war. They deserved what they
got. You have nothing to feel bad about.”
“You think them German fellas I killed knew who started it?” Elizabeth wasn’t sure how to take the question. Was it an expression of cynical doubt . . . or sincere hope?”
― Alfred Nicols, Lost Love's Return

“Now,” she said. “There is something I want you to do for me that is
more important than sex.”
“What?”
“Just lie here all night and hold me and let me be close. Sex can be good, but often what a woman wants most is to just be held and to feel warm and close and loved . . . feel protected and secure.”
“I can do that,” he said. And he did.”
― Alfred Nicols, Lost Love's Return

“Peter looked up and gazed at a stained-glass window behind the altar depicting Christ on the Cross with a caption: 'God is Love.' Another major tenet of Peterism.”
― Alfred Nicols, Lost Love's Return

“In this small county, Thelma knew the history of Emma and her family. What was saddest to Thelma, after Emma had left, was the feeling that Emma’s marriage to any man was probably doomed to failure when she was but a little girl; doomed to failure in 1904, when her father ran off to Texas with another woman, abandoned her, her mother, her three siblings. This marriage was doomed to failure when Emma’s father taught her the basic nature of men; that they were congenitally, irrevocably, and unpredictably sorry; that she could never really trust any man, even with his own money.”
― Alfred Nicols, Lost Love's Return