The Foxhole Court Quotes

He'd come to the Foxhole Court every inch a lie, but his friends made him into someone real. ~ Nora Sakavic

Welcome to the Foxhole Court. ~ Nora Sakavic

After everything they did to you, how can you stand me?" Neil asked...He gestured between them knowing Andrew would understand. "How is this okay?"
"It isn't a this," Andrew said.
"That's not what I'm asking. You know it isn't-Andrew wait!" he insisted but Andrew was turning away like he couldn't hear Neil anymore.
Neil reached for him, unwilling to let him leave without a real answer.
"No," Andrew said and Neil's hand froze a breath from Andrew's arm.
Andrew went still as well and they stood for a minute in awful silence.
Finally, Andrew looked back at him, but for a moment, Neil didn't know who he was looking at. In the space of one breath, Andrew's expression went so dark Neil almost retreated. Then Andrew was back, as calm and uncaring as always and he caught Neil's wrist to push his hand to his side. He dug his fingers in before letting go, not quite hard enough to hurt and said, "that's why."
Neil stopped when Andrew told him to. I wasn't much but it was more than enough. ~ Nora Sakavic

Right near the corner was a picture Neil didn't recognize at all: a shot of Neil and Andrew standing alone. They were bundled up in their matching coats and staring each other down barely a breath apart. It took Neil a moment to place it; the people packed into the background didn't look like a game crowd. The windows finally gave it away. Dan had taken this at Upstate Regional Airport on their way to play against Texas. Neil hadn't even realized she'd been watching them. Neil had gotten caught in a couple of her group pictures, but this was the only one up that had Neil's natural looks. Dan had even caught Neil on his right side, so the bandage over his tattoo wasn't showing. This was a picture of Nathaniel Wesninski; this was the moment Neil gave Andrew his name. Neil reached out to tear the picture down but stopped as soon as he caught hold of the edge. He'd come to Palmetto State to play, but he'd also come because Kevin was proof that a real person existed behind all of his lies. In May both Nathaniel and Neil would be gone, but in June this picture would still be here. He'd be a tiny part of the Foxhole Court for years to come. It was comforting, or it should be. Neil didn't think comfort should feel like such a sick knot in his stomach ~ Nora Sakavic

The Foxhole Court was the only home he needed; he Foxes were his family. ~ Nora Sakavic

Everything about Andrew was hot, from the hands holding him down to the mouth steadily taking Neil apart. Neil finally understood why his mother thought this was so dangerous. ~ Nora Sakavic

He didn't want to think about this, didn't want to feel this, so he thought about the Foxes instead. He clung tight to the memory of their unhesitating friendship and their smiles. He pretended the heartbeat pounding a sick pace in his temples was an Exy ball ricocheting off the court walls. He thought of Wymack holding him up in December and Andrew pushing him down against the bedroom floor. The memories made him weak with grief and loss, but they made him stronger, too. He'd come to the Foxhole Court every inch a lie, but his friends made him into someone real. He'd hit the end of his rope before he wanted to and he hadn't accomplished everything he'd hoped to this year, but he'd done more with his life than he'd ever thought possible. That had to be enough. He traced the outline of a key into his bloody, burnt palm with a shaky finger, closed his eyes, and wished Neil Josten goodbye. ~ Nora Sakavic

Truth is irrefutable and untainted by bias. Sunrise, Abram, death: these are truths. ~ Nora Sakavic

Why don't you like girls?"
Nicky looked startled by the interruption, but he rallied quickly and made a face. "They're so soft."
Neil thought about Renee's bruised knuckles, Dan's fierce spirit, and Allison holding her ground on the court a week after Seth's death. He thought about his mother standing unflinching in the face of his father's violent anger and her ruthlessly leaving bodies in their wake. He felt compelled to say, "Some of the strongest people I've known are women."
"What? Oh, no," Nicky hurried to say. "I mean literally soft. Too many curves, see? I feel like my hands would slide right off. It's totally not my thing. I like…" He drew a box with his fingers as he searched for words. "Erik. Erik's perfect. He's a total outdoors junkie, rock climbing and hiking and mountain biking, all that awful bug-infested fresh-air stuff. But oh my god, you should see what it does to his body. He's like this, all hard edges." He drew another box. "He's stronger than I am, and I like that. I feel like I could lean on him all day and he wouldn't break a sweat. ~ Nora Sakavic

At the Foxhole Court "family" was a fantasy invented to make books and Hollywood movies more interesting. ~ Nora Sakavic

My outlook on warfare is best illustrated by a cartoon I did some thirty-odd years ago of a soldier in an Italian foxhole reading about the Normandy invasion and observing to his buddy that: The hell this ain't the most important hole in the world . I'm in it. ~ Bill Mauldin

I've always been curious about why one man jumps out of a foxhole with a grenade and charges a machine gun nest, and his buddy next to him sits there cowering. And my feeling is that the difference is tiny between the two. ~ Stephen Lang

Moralistic, therapeutic deism is fine with sin hiding in a foxhole. The gospel wants to nuke the hole. ~ Matt Chandler

They say certain people aren't good soldiers because if they're in a foxhole all night - you know, if you're creative and smart, you're thinking about all the different ways someone is going to blow your head off. But if you're not that smart, you're just like chilling out. And I feel like that in life. I'm just in the foxhole all fucking day thinking about everything that's going to go wrong in every possible way. ~ Judd Apatow

Goddamn it, you'll never get the Purple Heart hiding in a foxhole! Follow me! ~ Henry Pierson Crowe

Perhaps, the answer is that my ravaged mind rails against the idea of God, but something deeper in me calls out as if God might answer. 'There are not foxholes,' I guess, and depression is the deepest and deadliest foxhole I've been in. It may be the 'dark night of the soul' that the mystics talk about but in depression it is not so much that one becomes lost in the dark as one becomes the dark. ~ Parker J. Palmer

Maybe there are only atheists in foxholes. If the faithful truly and fully believe in a protective deity, why would they dive into a foxhole to protect themselves from the bullets whizzing by ? A part of their brain knows damn well that if they do not protect themselves, the bullets will hardly discriminate between those who claim faith and those who reject it. ~ J. Anderson Thomson

When you thought of permanent oblivion, temporary oblivion was the only foxhole you had. ~ Harry Turtledove

I slowly dug a stand-up foxhole up to my neck using my helmet. I don't think any of us slept that night. It was the first time in my tour when I wasn't sure I would make it. I'm not ashamed to say I did a lot of thinking about home and a lot of praying to the man upstairs. ~ Lanny Starr

People that spend time in a foxhole - they're never going to find that relationship anywhere else again ... Everything else pales next to that. When you think about the Second World War vets - more than even the Vietnam vets - there's a brotherhood. ~ Sylvester Stallone

My favorite picture is a picture of American soldiers surrounding a guy in a foxhole, Iraqi soldier, and the American guy says, "We're not going to harm you. We're American soldiers." ~ George H. W. Bush

The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life ... But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong - for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane. ~ Orson Scott Card

You know the saying 'there's no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole?' Well, there's no such thing as a vegetarian in an apocalypse, ~ Steven Konkoly

Army was boring, unfeeling, and chicken, and hated it. They found combat to be ugliness, destruction, and death, and hated it. Anything was better than the blood and carnage, the grime and filth, the impossible demands made on the body - anything, that is, except letting down their buddies. They also found in combat the closest brotherhood they ever knew. They found selflessness. They found they could love the other guy in their foxhole more than themselves. They found that in war, men who loved life would give their lives for them. ~ Stephen E. Ambrose

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil - everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self - your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching lo ~ Tim O'Brien

One night the month before, back on the other side of the Belgian border, Aughenbaugh had delivered a lecture on the etymology of the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an ancient Indo-European root signifying confusion. That was a foxhole night, bitter cold. The 5th Panzer Army was making its last great push west. You had to hand it to those Indo-Europeans, my grandfather thought, rolling through Vellinghausen. Confusion shown on the faces of the townspeople. War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs. It confounded conquest with liberation, anger with heartache, hunger with gratitude, hatred with awe. The 53rd Combat Engineers looked pretty confused, too. They were milling around at the edge of town, contemplating the long stretch of road between and beautiful downtown Berlin, trying to figure out if they ought to mine it or clear it of mines. ~ Michael Chabon

He saw a tattoo on her throat and he read it with some amusement. Foxhole prayers in a stylized cursive. Strange girl. The 'X' crossed the artery pulsing under her velvet skin. Skin he knew would be warm butter beneath his fangs.

X marks the spot, my dear. ~ Vanessa Gravenstein

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rusack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. ~ Tim O'Brien

The men digging in on both sides of me cursed the stench and the mud. I began moving the heavy, sticky clay mud with my entrenching shovel to shape out the extent of the foxhole before digging deeper. Each shovelful had to be knocked off the spade, because it stuck like glue. I was thoroughly exhausted and thought my strength wouldn't last from one sticky shovelful to the next.
Kneeling on the mud, I had dug the hole no more than six or eight inches deep when the odor of rotting flesh got worse. There was nothing to do but continue to dig, so I closed up my mouth and inhaled with short shallow breaths. Another spadeful of soil out of the hole released a mass of wriggling maggots that came welling up as though those beneath were pushing them out. I cursed and told the NCO as he came by what a mess I was digging into.
'You heard him, he said put the holes five yards apart.'
In disgust, I drove the spade into the soil, scooped out the insects, and threw them down the front of the ridge. The next stroke of the spade unearthed buttons and scraps of cloth from a Japanese army jacket in the mud - and another mass of maggots. I kept on doggedly. With the next thrust, metal hit the breastbone of a rotting Japanese corpse. I gazed down in horror and disbelief as the metal scraped a clean track through the mud along the dirty whitish bone and cartilage with ribs attached. The shoved skidded into the rotting abdomen with a squishing sound. The odor nearly overwhelmed me as ~ Eugene B. Sledge

There are no atheists in the foxhole. ~ Ernie Pyle

Religion and gods and beliefs - for me, it all comes down to your brother. And your brother might be the brother in your family, or it might be the guy next to you in the foxhole - it's about human connections. ~ Eric Kripke

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle. ~ Tom Waits

Why, my goodness, honey. After looking at all those pictures of seraphic and perspirationless babes for so long in the privacy of a foxhole, what is a poor doughfoot going to do when he comes home and discovers that American women are, after all, biological and given, under stress, to shiny noses? ~ Margaret Mitchell

Old soldiers sometimes say, "There are no atheists in foxholes." (A foxhole, in military slang, is a shallow pit in a dangerous place on the battlefield.) ~ N. T. Wright

Though this motion for a new trial is an application to the discretion of the Court, it must be remembered that the discretion to be exercised on such an occasion is not a wild but a sound discretion, and to be confined within those limits within which an honest man, competent to discharge the duties of his office, ought to confine himself. And that discretion will be best exercised by not deviating from the rules laid down by our predecessors; for the practice of the Court forms the law of the Court. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

When I saw her... my heart skipped a beat. Her expression was as open and trusting as that of a young child. Such purity is something never, ever seen at the court. Hieraglion is a mire of intrigue and deceit... yet there she was-- a simple, beautiful wildflower blooming in its midst. I wanted to protect her. Myself. With my own two hands. ~ Noriko Ogiwara

THE EMPRESS LO was not beautiful but she was ambitious and, sometimes, ambition can take you further than beauty. The women of the court never wondered how she got this far because as all women know, the rise to power is relatively simple ~ especially if it is a man who has control. ~ from the Three Lives of Empress Lo. Forthcoming. ~ Hope Barrett

I'm sorry to see that again we are turning to the courts for decisions that concern ethics. I think theologians and ethicists would better guide us in such matters, ... If my memory serves me well, more than a decade ago The Episcopal Church said euthanasia or the intentional shortening of an individual's life, by lethal doses of drugs or otherwise, was not acceptable. ~ Susan P. Crawford

Our courts provide a neutral forum for the adjudication of disputes under the law, not based on economic or political power, on race, on sex or any other personal characteristics. ~ Jon Kyl

The Supreme Court has now closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the criminal justice process, from stops and searches to plea bargaining and sentencing. The system of mass incarceration is now, for all practical purposes, thoroughly immunized from claims of racial bias. ~ Michelle Alexander

Study the Constitution. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislatures, and enforced in courts of justice. ~ Abraham Lincoln

You drove me mad, ~ Sarah J. Maas

Anger is always reserved for someone else. And yet, I've been in a room with a woman who escaped a war, who lost her father in ethnic cleansing, whose mother burned her hair, whose cousin raped her. "What right do I have to be angry, when I'm alive? she said.

Anger is a privilege of the truly broken, and yet I've never met a woman who was broken enough that she allowed herself to be angry. An angry woman must answer for herself. The reasons for her anger must be picked over, examined, and debated. My anger must stand the scrutiny of the court of law, of evidentiary procedures. I must prove it comes from somewhere justified and not just because one time some man touched my sister. Or because one time some man touched some woman and will continue on and on. ~ Roxane Gay

While appropriation art is critical to art, it's an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court. ~ Lawrence Lessig

So," I demanded, trying to sound confident, "where can we find this trod to New Orleans?"
"The frost giant ruins," Ash replied, looking thoughtful. "Very close to Mab's court." At Puck's glare, he shrugged and offered a tiny, rueful smirk. "She goes to Mardi Gras every year."
I pictured the Queen of the Unseelie Court flashing a couple of drunken partygoers, and giggled uncontrollably. All three shot me a strange look. "Sorry," I gasped, biting my lip. "Still kind of giddy, I guess. ~ Julie Kagawa

But I mean, even my family gets spoiled at times watching me doing things that I do, on and off the court. ~ LeBron James

When you have incidences like the Trayvon Martin verdict, the erosion of certain fundamental rights like voting, it just reminds us that we're always one Supreme Court justice vote away from losing the progress that has been made. ~ Terri Sewell

Stella: I got a nose for trouble. I can smell it ten miles away ... I can smell trouble right here in this apartment. First you smash your leg. Then you get to lookin' out the window. See things you shouldn't see. Trouble. I can see you in court now, surrounded by a bunch of lawyers in double-breasted suits. You're pleading: 'Judge, it was only a little bit of innocent fun. I love my neighbors like a father.' And the Judge says, 'Well, congratulations, you've just given birth to three years in ... ' ~ Thelma Ritter

Inexplicable: I recently won in court to stop my book "America by Heart" from being leaked, but US Govt can't stop Wikileaks' treasonous act? ~ Sarah Palin