Words matter. These are the best Karl Marlantes Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I knew many Marines had done brave deeds that no one saw and for which they got no medals at all. I was having a very hard time carrying those medals and didn’t have the insight or maturity to know what to do with my combination of guilt and pride.
And I think that it’s – the military has actually made improvements, so people are considering post-traumatic stress disorder as, at the least, a possible psychological problem. You know, when I was in Vietnam, it was just considered malingering. And we’re making progress.
Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well – you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times – ‘War and Peace,’ ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ – all those were really important to me.
In the military I could exercise the power of being automatically respected because of the medals on my chest, not because I had done anything right at the moment to earn that respect. This is pretty nice. It’s also a psychological trap that can stop one’s growth and allow one to get away with just plain bad behavior.
When I first got back from the war, I said, ‘I’m gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.’ So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.
I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That’s my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.
When the peace treaty is signed, the war isn’t over for the veterans, or the family. It’s just starting.
The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn’t teach me how to deal with killing.
I began writing ‘Matterhorn’ in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript.
I don’t want any romantics to go into the military. I’m not a pacifist. I think we need a military, and the better one we have, the better off we are. I don’t want kids going in there thinking that it’s John Wayne on Iwo Jima. That’s not healthy.
I grew up in Oregon, where as a teenager I worked with my grandfather Axel on his i shing boat at the mouth of the Columbia River.
‘Matterhorn’ is my metaphor of the Vietnam War – we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again.
I mean, if you’re proud of what you’ve done when you’ve served in the military, well then we call that bragging. And if you are unhappy about what happened, we call that complaining. And so what are you going to do?
‘The Odyssey’ is the great tale, and I was really taken by ‘The Iliad,’ so I dig into those things, and when I was a kid I didn’t. You’ve gotta have a certain level of understanding yourself before that stuff really starts to resonate.
War is society’s dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults.
