A thug. In peacetime Fitch would be hanging around a pool table giving the cops trouble. He was perfect for war. Tibbets had chosen his men well - most of them, anyway. Moving back past Haddock January stopped to stare at the group of men in the navigation cabin. They joked, drank coffee. They were all a bit like Fitch: young toughs, capable and thoughtless. They're having a good time, an adventure. That was January's dominant impression of his companions in the 509th; despite all the bitching and the occasional moments of overmastering fear, they were having a good time. His mind spun forward and he saw what these young men would grow up to be like as clearly as if they stood before him in businessmen's suits, prosperous and balding. They would be tough and capable and thoughtless, and as the years passed and the great war receded in time they would look back on it with ever-increasing nostalgia, for they would be the survivors and not the dead. Every year of this war would feel like ten in their memories, so that the war would always remain the central experience of their lives - a time when history lay palpable in their hands, when each of their daily acts affected it, when moral issues were simple, and others told them what to do - so that as more years passed and the survivors aged, bodies falling apart, lives in one rut or another, they would unconsciously push harder and harder to thrust the world into war again, thinking somewhere inside themselves that if they could only return to world war then they would magically be again as they were in the last one - young, and free, and happy. And by that time they would hold the positions of power, they would be capable of doing it. . Kim Stanley Robinson
About This Quote

Our lives are like a great many things - a movie, a book, or piece of music. We watch these items unfold and we marvel at their beauty and the mastery of the creators. What we do not realize is that when our life unfolds, we are in the hands of the authors. Whether we like it or not, we are in the hands of fate and can only hope to create our lives to be at least as beautiful as we think we deserve to be. Life is not ours to control; we can only allow ourselves to be swept along by it and hope to pick up some hints about who we should become, what we should do, and how best to live our days.

Source: The Lucky Strike

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  2. They're in love. Fuck the war. - Thomas Pynchon
  3. If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are. - Kristin Hannah
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More Quotes By Kim Stanley Robinson
  1. They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.
  2. The word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. (Bistami) Pg. 128
  3. The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.
  4. You just don't have faith! " Frank repeated." Well I hope I never get it! It's like being hit by a hammer in the head!
  5. We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.
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