Kevin Powers Quotes

A moment is never long enough to account for tragedy when you are in it.

A new patina whitening the walls with marks of memories, all running together as if the memories themselves aspired to be the walls in which I was imprisoned ...

To continue, I had to see the world with clear eyes, to focus on the essential. We only pay attention to rare things, and death was not rare.

One of the things my service in Iraq did give me was this freedom from fear of failure or any kind of expectations that I had to take a standard path.

You are only as sick as your secrets.

I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn't mind. The world makes liars of us all.

Noises and smells, those can bring back powerful memories. I remember when I was going to school one Fourth of July, and there were a lot of fireworks going off. I knew that I was in Richmond. I knew that I was a college student. But I thought people were shooting at me.

As human beings, we have the blessing and the curse that we're able to adapt to almost anything. No matter how extreme the circumstances you're in, they become normal.

But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed.

I had feared the truth on her behalf and it had not been my right to make that choice for her.

Writing was always an aspiration, but I'd kept it a secret even from myself.

There was no center to the world. The curves of all our bells are cracked.

I wasn't a good student in high school. I wanted to go to college, but they weren't exactly beating down my door to offer me admission, and it's so expensive in the U.S. If you join up for a period, the army will pay your school and provide a stipend.

His English was exceptional. There was a glottal sound in his voice, but it was not harsh. I'd often asked him to help me with my sparse Arabic, trying to get my pronunciation of this or that word right. "Shukran." "Afwan." "Qumbula." Thank you. You're welcome. Bomb.

To say what happened, the mere facts, the disposition of events in time, would come to seem like a kind of treachery. The dominoes of moments, lined up symmetrically, then tumbling backward against the hazy and unsure push of cause, showed only that a fall is every object's destiny. It is not enough to say what happened. Everything happened. Everything fell.

I'm always most interested in writing about things that I don't understand.

All choices are illusions, or if they are not illusions their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all the other men and women deciding anything in that moment.

The rest is history, they say. Bullshit, I say. It's imagination or it's nothing, and must be, because what is created in this world can be undone, unmade; the threads of a rope can be unwoven. And if that rope is needed as a guideline for a ferry to a farther shore, then one must invent a way to weave it back, or there will be drownings in the streams that cross our paths. I accept now, though in truth it took some time, that must must be it's own permission.

I understand that it's incredibly difficult to watch what's happening on the news every day and not become inured to it. I've fallen victim to that myself, wanting to look away.

And I understood why he came and why I couldn't go, not just then at least, because one never knows if what one sees will disappear forever.

My personal opinion is that if someone writes honestly about war, it will inherently be anti-war.

Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn't any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you're taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sign posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever and yeah they might have been trying to kill you too, so you say, What are you goona do?, but really it doesn't matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing you could have done, and the one person you promised would live is dead, and you have seen all things die in more manners than you'd like to recall and for a while the whole thing fucking ravaged your spirit like some deep-down shit, man, that you didn't even realize you had until only the animals made you sad, the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells and the fucking guts of everything stinking like metal and burning garbage and you walk around and the smell is deep down into you now and yo

It's not just: you get off the plane, you're back home, everything's fine. Maybe the physical danger ends, but soldiers are still deeply at risk of being injured in a different way.

The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.

I would only sit muttering with envy for their broad umbrellas, their dryness, and the sweet, unwounded banality of their lives.

I smelled the clean house
and the wood-frame bed. It was all filler. The noise, the sound, they existed
just to take up space. My muscles flexed into the emptiness I still called home.

I didn't want to smile and say thanks. Didn't want to pretend I'd done anything except survive

Through those drooping branches the city sprawled out haphazardly like a drunk on a sidewalk, fallen where he may.

I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive.

I'm not even sure he would have realized he was permitted to have his own desires and preferences. That it would have been okay for him to have a favorite place, to walk with satisfaction down the long straight boulevards of whatever post he may have gone to next, to admire the uniformity of the grass, green and neatly shorn beneath a blue, limitless sky, to bury himself in a sandy shallow of some clear cold stream and let the water wash over the pitted skin of his scarred body. I don't know what his favorite place would have been like, because I don't believe he would have let himself have one. He would have waited for one to be assigned to him. That's the way he was ... Everything he'd done had been a response to a preexisting expectation.

We were not destined to survive. The fact is, we were not destined at all.

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

And what did it mean that this choice was an illusion, that all choices are illusions, or that if they are not illusions, their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choice of all the other men and women deciding in that moment?

I didn't want to be responsible for him. I had enough to worry about. I was disintegrating, too. How was I supposed to keep us both in tact?

I understood. Being from a place where a few facts are enough to define you, where a few habits can fill a life, causes a unique kind of shame. We'd had small lives, populated by a longing from something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams. So we'd come here, where life needed no elaboration and others would tell us who to be.

When we neared the orchard a flock of birds lit from its outer rows. They hadn't been there long. The branches shook with their absent weight and the birds circled above in the riddy mackerel sky, where they made an artless semaphore. I was afraid, I smelled copper and cheap wine. The sun was up, but a half-moon hung low on the opposite horizon, cutting through the morning sky like a figure from a child's pull-tab book.
We were lined along the ditch up to our ankles in a soupy muck. It all seemed in that moment to be the conclusion of a poorly designed experiment in inevitability. Everything was in its proper place, waiting for a pause in time, for the source of all momentum to be stilled, so that what remained would be nothing more than detritus to be tallied up. The world was paper-thin as far as I could tell. And the world was the orchard, and the orchard was what came next. But none of that was true. I was only afraid of dying.

The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren't any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood.

The war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on.

The details of the world in which we live are always secondary to the fact that we must live in them.

To understand the world, one's place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning.

All pain is the same. Only the details are different.

Freedom is not the same as lack of accountability.

There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told and what is true.

Her grief was dignified and hidden, as is most grief, which is partly why there is always so much of it to go around.

I wanted to go to sleep and stay there, that's all. A passive wish, one I didn't push. Sure, there is a fine line between not wanting to wake up and actually wanting to kill yourself, and while I discovered you can walk that line for a long while without even noticing, anybody who is around you surely will ...

I wanted something that I could look back on and say, yes, you were fighting too, you burned to be alive, and whatever failure or accident of nature caused you to be killed could be explained by something other than the fact that I'd missed your giving up.