Green Reader
War Literature
Penelope Lively – Moon Tiger
“I said that one of the things one never did was notice this place. See it for itself. For us it was nothing but a backdrop. ‘It’s a beautiful country,’ I said. ‘And we don’t see it.’ And he said, ‘We shall always see it’.”
John McNulty – Cluney McFarrar’s Hardtack
“You don’t really know what’s happening in a war like that until a couple years later when you come home and read in a slow-written book just what the hell was going on that time.”
Arthur Miller – All My Sons
“CHRIS: They didn’t die; they killed themselves for each other. I mean that exactly; a little more selfish and they’d’ve been here today. And I got an idea- watching them go down. Everything was being desroyed, see, but it seemed to me that one new thing was being made. A kind of- responsibility. Man for man. You understand me?- To show that, to bring that on to the earth again like some kind of monument and everyone would feel it standing there, behind him, and it would make a difference to him. (Pause). And then I came home and it was incredible. I- there was no meaning in it here; the whole thing to them was a kind of a- bus accident.”
Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms
“‘I wish we could do something really sinful,’ Catherine said. ‘Everything we do seems so innocent and simple. I can’t believe we do anything wrong’.”
Dorothy Parker – Soldiers of the Republic
“It was dark outside, the quick, new dark that leaps down without dusk on the day; but, because there were no lights in the streets, it seemed as set and as old as midnight. So you wondered that all the babies were still up. There were babies everywhere in the café, babies serious without solemnity and interested in a tolerant way in their surroundings.”
Green Reader 