Stephen Crane - The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

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Sometimes, the most profound of awakenings come wrapped in the quietest of moments.

Stephen Crane
He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.

Stephen Crane
The line, broken into moving fragments by the ground, went calmly on through fields and woods. The youth looked at the men nearest him, and saw, for the most part, expressions of deep interest, as if they were investigating something that had fascinated them. One or two stepped with overvaliant airs as if they were already plunged into war. Others walked as upon thin ice. The greater part of the untested men appeared quiet and absorbed. They were going to look at war, the red animal — war, the blood-swollen god. And they were deeply engrossed in this march.

Stephen Crane
It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.

Stephen Crane
It was surprising that Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment.

Stephen Crane
He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.

Stephen Crane
It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks — an existence of soft and eternal peace.
Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.

Stephen Crane
A man with a full stomach and the respect of his fellows had no business to scold about anything that he might think to be wrong in the ways of the universe, or even with the ways of society. Let the unfortunates rail; the others may play marbles.

Stephen Crane
And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends.

Stephen Crane
The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.

Stephen Crane
A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to climb a tree. This would demonstrate that he was indeed a seer.

Stephen Crane
He had fought like a pagan who defends his religion.

Stephen Crane
At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.

Stephen Crane
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors.

Stephen Crane
He saw that it was an ironical thing for him to be running thus toward that which he had been at such pains to avoid.

Stephen Crane