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Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war.

Loss of hope rather than loss of life is what decides the issues of war. But helplessness induces hopelessness.

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we 'know' that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.

War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.

To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences.

If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.

There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.