“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.”

“I can't envision an honest war novel that left war in a positive light.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Freedom is not the same as lack of accountability.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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