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“Engineers at the Naval Research Laboratory composed an ode to the paint on their nuclear submarines:
The purpose of the hull is to protect the paint.
The purpose of the reactor is to drive the paint around.
The purpose of the weapons is to defend the paint.”

I took such a long break from reading this that I caught up calendar-wise

“We’s here to tell you: if you still see stars overhead in there,
maybe what you figured for spyglass
is a nightstick,
and when you called yourself -gazing,
you was being -struck.”

The chapter about Sherman is especially righteous:

“Of course, this is all lost on the Phil Leighs of the world, who—for reasons that cut deep into the ideology of the American right wing—always take burnt houses too seriously, and dead people far too lightly. To them, burning a house is a crime, while shooting a Yankee soldier in the eye is just part of war's rich tapestry.”

“The effect of my first fiction, however, and the horror it caused taught me a life lesson: fiction can have a greater impact than the truth, and be more truthful.” (109)

Anything you want to forget will come back to you, it will haunt you so vividly that it feels as if you’re going through it all over again, often causing you the same overwhelming and unmanageable feelings as it did the first time; you fear the intensity might kill you and so you fight its return, you resist, but you can’t prevent or shield yourself from the pain that follows and so you are forced to relive it.

“the life-saving rockets were hardly two meters long, yet they connected our grandma’s village with the endless expanse of the universe, we stared at the sky from our village and travelled through the stratosphere in fantasy aircrafts, much further than the anti-hail rockets did, much further than Laika had ever gone, her dog skeleton still circling us in orbit” (72)

“You keep having the hope that this is a prologue but no one knows how far they are into their own story. Some of us are hoping it’s the end.” (94)

How little I have died!