Mortars Quotes

This young woman," said Diana, "was responsible for the destruction of the Triumvirate's fleet."
"Well, I had a lot of help," Lavinia said.
"I don't understand," I said, turning to Lavinia. "You made all those mortars malfunction?"
Lavinia looked offended. "Well, yeah. Somebody had to stop the fleet. I did pay attention during siege-weapon class and ship-boarding class. It wasn't that hard. All it took was a little fancy footwork."
Hazel finally managed to pick her jaw off the pavement. "Wasn't that hard?"
"We were motivated! The fauns and dryads did great." She paused, her expression momentarily clouding, as if she remembered something unpleasant. "Um…besides, the Nereids helped a lot. There was only a skeleton crew aboard each yacht. Not, like, actual skeletons, but - you know what I mean. Also, look!"
She pointed proudly at her feet, which were now adorned with the shoes of Terpsichore from Caligula's private collection.
"You mounted an amphibious assault on an enemy fleet," I said, "for a pair of shoes."
Lavinia huffed. "Not just for the shoes, obviously." She tap-danced a routine that would've made Savion Glover proud. "Also to save the camp, and the nature spirits, and Michael Kahale's commandos."
Hazel held up her hands to stop the overflow of information. "Wait. Not to be a killjoy - I mean, you did an amazing thing! - but you still deserted your post, Lavinia. I certainly didn't give you permission - "
"I was acting ~ Rick Riordan

In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John Burns, I experienced four near misses in all, three of them in the course of one day. I certainly thought that the Bosnian cause was worth fighting for and worth defending, but I could not take myself seriously enough to imagine that my own demise would have forwarded the cause. (I also discovered that a famous jaunty Churchillism had its limits: the old war-lover wrote in one of his more youthful reminiscences that there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result. In my case, the experience of a whirring, whizzing horror just missing my ear was indeed briefly exciting, but on reflection made me want above all to get to the airport. Catching the plane out with a whole skin is the best part by far.) Or suppose I had been hit by that mortar that burst with an awful shriek so near to me, and turned into a Catherine wheel of body-parts and (even worse) body-ingredients? Once again, I was moved above all not by the thought that my death would 'count,' but that it would not count in the least. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The war is for the family. The battle for their children's education and their grandchildren's freedom is as real to them as if they could witness the clangs of bayonets on the field or hear the blasts of mortars in the harbor. ~ Oliver DeMille

I would so much rather put up with mortars and rockets than headquarters. Mortars and rockets are exciting and can only kill you, but those guys can frustrate and bore you to death, which is a damned sight worse. The home of the useless regulations!!!'[6] ~ Christopher Robbins

Lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; ~ David Mitchell

Mortars and artillery don't discriminate against gender. ~ Lynsey Addario

Were you ever in Elsinore, Mr Jagiello?' asked Jack.
Oh, many a time, sir,' said Jagiello. 'I know it well. I believe I could show you Hamlet's grave from here.'
I was really wondering whether they had ten or thirteen inch mortars on the upper terrace,' said Jack, 'but I should be very happy to see Hamlet's grave as well.'
Both ten and thirteen, sir. And if you go a little to the right from the farthest turret, there are some trees: and among those trees there is the grave. You can just make out the rocks.'
So there he lies,' said jack, his telescope leveled. 'Well, well: we must all come to it. But it was a capital piece, capital. I never laughed so much in my life.'
A capital piece indeed,' said Stephen, 'and I doubt I could have done much better myself. But, do you know, I have never in my own mind classed it among the comedies. Pray did you read it recently?'
I never read it at all,' said Jack. 'That is to say, not right through. No: I did something better than that - I acted in it. There, the upper terrace fires. I was a midshipman at the time. ~ Patrick O'Brian

His ears were attuned for the steady firing of Couzens' heavy machine guns, which he knew should now commence, and the thud of his carefully sited mortars, but he did not hear them and he realized, suddenly and sickeningly, that the Chinese had not attacked across the spit of land. They were pouring across the ice, and had taken Dog Company in the rear. ~ Pat Frank

Sarajevo was this beautiful city, very cosmopolitan, multiethnic, full of wonderful people, artists and writers and poets and Serbs and Muslims and Croats, and living side by side. And then this medieval siege, and it was a medieval siege, came, and the Bosnian Serbs were on the hills lobbing in rockets and grenades and mortars. ~ Janine Di Giovanni

But sometimes I do wonder if I'm love-blind the way some people are colour-blind, or most people are ghost-blind. If love (true or false, thick or thin, requited or un-) really is the only glue ever mortars our sad hearts' bricks together, and me not swift enough to recognize the label any time I happened to pass it by.
Because: living is transience, after all--people aren't really permanent 'til they're dead, no matter what you might've felt for 'em beforehand. Always changing... ~ Gemma Files

If the submarines, the aerial torpedoes, the poison gas, the liquid fire, the long-distance guns, the hand grenades, the trench mortars, and all the other things injure without killing them, they are sent back again and again after being patched up until they are killed. ~ Evadne Price

Each day had the same bloody rhythm: mortars at dawn, car bombs by 11: 00 a.m., drive-by shootings before tea, and mortars again at dusk. At night the death squads went to work. ~ Richard Engel

Lost

In black as solid as a mire
In a land no one would die for
In a time I was lost
To anyone who ever loved me
The world set itself on fire
And the sky collapsed above me

In a place no one could call home
In a place I breathed and slept
In a battle no one understood
That continued all the same
I sat defenseless and alone
With the insignificance of my name

In the midst of the Lord's birth
On a night meant to be peaceful
In a country of the Prophet
Where women don't live free
I spoke to God from the shaking Earth
And prayed my mother would forgive me

In a city without power
In a desert torn by religion
In a bank between two rivers
We added up the decade's cost
And glorified the final hour
Of a war that everyone had lost

In the dust of helplessness
In a concrete bunker
In a fate I chose myself
I waited without remorse
To fight again as recompense
For wasted lives and discourse

-an original poem about an attack on our base in Iraq during the Arab Spring ~ Dianna Skowera