Ernie Pyle Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

All the rest of us - you and me and even the thousands of soldiers behind the lines in Africa - we want terribly yet only academically for the war to get over.

Ernie Pyle
War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.

Ernie Pyle
I've been immersed in it too long. My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused. The hurt has become too great.

Ernie Pyle
But to the fighting soldier that phase of the war is behind. It was left behind after his first battle. His blood is up. He is fighting for his life, and killing now for him is as much a profession as writing is for me.

Ernie Pyle
Below us the Thames grew lighter, and all around below were the shadows - the dark shadows of buildings and bridges that formed the base of this dreadful masterpiece.

Ernie Pyle
Our artillery has really been sensational. For once we have enough of something and at the right time. Officers tell me they actually have more guns than they know what to do with.

Ernie Pyle
The closest fires were near enough for us to hear the crackling flames and the yells of firemen. Little fires grew into big ones even as we watched. Big ones died down under the firemen's valor only to break out again later.

Ernie Pyle
In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory - there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.

Ernie Pyle
The American soldier is quick in adapting himself to a new mode of living. Outfits which have been here only three days have dug vast networks of ditches three feet deep in the bare brown earth. They have rigged up a light here and there with a storage battery.

Ernie Pyle
I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can't be won without.

Ernie Pyle
The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.

Ernie Pyle
About every two minutes a new wave of planes would be over. The motors seemed to grind rather than roar, and to have an angry pulsation like a bee buzzing in blind fury.

Ernie Pyle
Say what you will, nothing can make a complete soldier except battle experience.

Ernie Pyle
I write from the worm's-eye point of view.

Ernie Pyle
Somebody said that carrier pilots were the best in the world, and they must be or there wouldn't be any of them left alive.

Ernie Pyle
Someday when peace has returned to this odd world I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges.

Ernie Pyle
I was away from the front lines for a while this spring, living with other troops, and considerable fighting took place while I was gone. When I got ready to return to my old friends at the front I wondered if I would sense any change in them.

Ernie Pyle
For me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.

Ernie Pyle