Best 13 quotes of James Carroll on MyQuotes

American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war.

Before entering the seminary, I had not encountered the life-changing potential of reading as a source of meaning, as a way of ordering one's inner life, and being rooted in the world.

It takes a disciplined imagination to acknowledge that the less personal savageries of bombs, missiles, artillery and heavy weapons are, to those blown to smithereens, also barbaric. The main horror of what the coalition is doing is not a matter of the occasional soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war crime, but the steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the Iraqi people. This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance, within the rules of engagement. The war itself is the American war crime.

Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.

Telling our stories is what saves us. The story is enough... The very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of narrative is, by definition, holy.

There are so many flaws, .. I don't think they can be fixed.

There are times when we stop, we sit still. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.

The whole story of human and personal progress is an unmitigated tale of denials today-denials of rest, denials or repose and comfort and ease and pleasure-that tomorrow may be richer.

We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things....but, there are times when we must stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or in its memory. We listen, and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

O mesmo João Paulo II que patrocinou na Polônia a Igreja mais engajada politicamente dos tempos modernos, a ponto de enviar grandes quantias de dinheiro do Vaticano para o Solidariedade, condenou, silenciou e disciplinou padres e freiras da Nicarágua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brasil, Haiti e México, por causa de sua assim chamada atividade política. O papa que quer tornar Pio XII santo é reticente a respeito de Oscar Romero. o bispo de El salvador que foi assassinado no altar. O papa que pôs sob cerco os ditadores impiedosos do comunismo foi o primeiro e o único chefe de estado do mundo a reconhecer a legitimidade da junta militar que derrubou o presidente democraticamente eleito do Haiti ( e ex-padre) Jean Bertrande Aristide. Digo "assim chamada atividade política" porque os padres e freiras da Libertação insistiam em que suas ações tinham mais a ver com sua leitura do Evangelho do que com qualquer texto político. Observadores da diferença entre reações da hierarquia católica, digamos, na Polônia, onde a Igreja deu apoio ao Solidariedade, e na Nicarágua, onde a Igreja foi um canal putativo para dinheiro da CIA durante a guerra dos Contra de Reagan, ficaram com a sensação de que não era ao totalitarismo como tal que a Igreja se opunha, apenas ao totalitarismo que não era amigável em relação à Igreja.

Por causa da "sombria simbiose" entre o antigo ódio cristão contra os judeus e o racismo moderno, o programa antijudaico de Hitler, mesmo no seu ponto extremo, simplesmente não era tão ofensivo para a ampla população de católicos.

...she had discovered within herself the unlikely gift for functioning with equilibrium and efficiency inside a full-blown, unending nightmare. [A Red Cross worker during WWII in Italy]