Best 37 quotes of Kevin Powers on MyQuotes

Kevin Powers

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

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

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    I had the feeling that if I encountered anyone they would intuit my disgrace and would judge me instantly. Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history. At least that's what I thought. Now I know: all pain is the same. Only the details are different.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    I think a lot of the guys I know and a lot of people I've talked to, what they want is very often what most people want, a kind of simple life, a livelihood, a family, people who care about them, people they can care about. I think vets on the whole want the same things that everybody else does.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn’t much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    Joining the military is not to be taken lightly. You're putting every part of yourself at risk, not just your body but your moral and spiritual centre.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    Michael Koryta's THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD is an absolutely thrilling read. I read most of it with my breath held, occasionally exhaling to ask myself, 'What will happen next?' I highly recommend it.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

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

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

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

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem. It makes sense in my own mind, but I'm trying to figure out a way to articulate it... It's like looking at a painting: you're able to take in the totality of the work all at once, and so processing whatever information that painting is giving you is almost secondary to simply apprehending what's in front of you.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

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

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    The world makes liars of us all.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

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

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

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

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    You want to fall, that's all. You think it can't go on like that. It's as if your life is a perch on the edge of a cliff and going forward seems impossible, not for a lack of will, but a lack of space. The possibility of another day stands in defiance of the laws of physics. And you can't go back. So you want to fall, let go, give up, but you can't. And every breath you take reminds you of that fact. So it goes.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

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

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    For one brief incalculable moment we were not brave or afraid.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    Hey, how are you?" they'd say. And I'd answer, "I feel like I'm being eaten from the inside out and I can't tell anyone what's going on because everyone is so grateful to me all the time and I'll feel like I'm ungrateful or something. Or like I'll give away that I don't deserve anyone's gratitude and really they should all hate me for what I've done but everyone loves me for it and it's driving me crazy." Right. 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, your're taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight 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 gonna do?, but really it doesn't matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing you could have done, 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...

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    I looked out the window and saw the street and railroad tracks, the woods beyond. Beyond the woods, the county of which they were a part. And so on, until it all dissolved into the larger thing: my mother's house becoming every other house as I once had seen it, sitting atop the southern end of a broad river valley, close enough to the the mountains that every few years a scared black bear would wander down into the remaining forest, and close enough to the ocean that those early English settlers took it as the farthest point they'd go upstream, the geology of the place preventing them from having any choice other than the one wherein they said, "We are lost; therefore we will call this home." And close enough that as a child I had been teased by older kids who said if I only tried hard enough I would smell salt water, and I, believing, stood among the light poles and the gulls in the parking lots of A&Ps and cried when I knew that it was true despite the fact that they had meant to lie, as children sometimes do.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    It's lovely to think that snow can be special. we're always told it is. Of all those million million flakes that fall, no two are alike, forever and ever, amen. I've spent some time looking out the window of my cabin watching snowflakes fall like a shot dove's feathers fluttering slowly down to the ground. They all look the same to me.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    I've come to accept that parts of life are constant, that just because something happens on two different days doesn't make it a goddamn miracle.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    We were not destined to survive. The fact is, we were not destined at all. The war would take what it could get.

  • By Anonym
    Kevin Powers

    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.