Karl Marlantes Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy the body for its own sake. Look at overweight executives headed for heart attacks on the way to getting their pictures in Fortune or anorexic models suffering slow starvation on their way to getting their pictures in Vogue. Protecting ego is the general case.

Karl Marlantes
This nation should be less worried about putting the Vietnam syndrome behind us than restarting the World War II victory syndrome that resulted in the Vietnam syndrome in the first place.

Karl Marlantes
Once we recognize our shadow's existence we must resist the enticing step of going with its flow.

Karl Marlantes
The time for debilitating fear is before and after the mission.

Karl Marlantes
He lay before God as a woman opens herself to a man, with legs apart, stomach exposed, arms open. But unlike some women, he did not have the inner strength that allowed them to do such a thing without fear. There was no woman's strength in Mellas at all.

Karl Marlantes
Quitting is unthinkable and pain is just weakness leaving the body

Karl Marlantes
It won't hurt you. It's just to kill plants. It's called Agent Orange...and it won't bother humans.

Karl Marlantes
It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn't know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about

Karl Marlantes
We all want to be special, to stand out; there's nothing wrong with this. The irony is that every human being is special to start with, because we're unique to start with. But we then go through some sort of boot camp from the age of zero to about 18 where we learn everything we can about how not to be unique.

Karl Marlantes
War is society's dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults.

Karl Marlantes
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 didnt have the insight or maturity to know what to do with my combination of guilt and pride.

Karl Marlantes
For every veteran who goes through a divorce, a wife goes through one, too. For every veteran alone in the basement, there is a wife upstairs, bewildered, isolated and in despair from the dark clouds of war that hangs over family life.

Karl Marlantes
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.

Karl Marlantes
How could you get mad at someone who neither needed to attack nor was at all worried about being able to defend? It was like getting mad at Switzerland.

Karl Marlantes
The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn't teach me how to deal with killing.

Karl Marlantes