Kevin Powers Quotes

But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed.

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.

I wasn’t a good student in high school. I wanted to go to college, but they weren’t exactly beating down my door to offer me admission, and it’s so expensive in the U.S. If you join up for a period, the army will pay your school and provide a stipend.

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.

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.

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.

I’m always most interested in writing about things that I don’t understand.

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.

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.

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.

I can’t envision an honest war novel that left war in a positive light.

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

There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told and what is true.

Freedom is not the same as lack of accountability.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

In a lot of ways, the task at hand for any poem is to approach something that defies exactness or definition with a kind of exactness or precision.