Michael Shaara Quotes

I've been a soldier all my life. I've fought from the ranks on up, you know my service. But sir, I must tell you now, I believe this attack will fail. No 15,000 men ever made could take that ridge. It's a distance of more than a mile, over open ground. When the men come out of the trees, they will be under fire from Yankee artillery from all over the field. And those are Hancock's boys! And now, they have the stone wall like we did at Fredericksburg.

There's nothing so much like a god on earth as a General on a battlefield.

If men were equal in America, all these Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves.

A man who has been shot at is a new realist, and what do you say to a realist when the war is a war of ideals?

Perhaps it was only that when you try to put it into words you cannot express it truly, it never sounds as you dream it.

Pickett excused himself, watchful of Longstreet. Pickett was always saying something to irritate somebody, and he rarely knew why, so his method was simply to apologize in general from time to time and let people know he meant well and then to shove off and hope for the best. He apologized and departed, curls ajiggle.

Why do there have to be men like that, men who enjoy another man's dying?

Home. One place is just like another, really. Maybe not. But truth is it's all just rock and dirt and people are roughly the same. I was born up there but I'm no stranger here. Have always felt at home everywhere, even in Virginia, where they hate me. Everywhere you go there's nothing but the same rock and dirt and houses and people and deer and birds. They give it all names, but I'm at home everywhere. Odd thing: unpatriotic. I was at home in England. I would be at home in the desert. In Afghanistan or far Typee. All mine, it all belongs to me. My world.

Southern women like their men religious and a little mad.

The thing about the heart was that you could not coax it or force it, as you could any other disease. Will power meant nothing.

It rained all that night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.