Klay Quotes: top 67 famous quotes about Klay

Klay Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Klay quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness. — Phil Klay

Pity addresses the perceived suffering, not the whole individual. — Phil Klay

For me, leaving the Marine Corps was more disorienting than returning home. — Phil Klay

Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it. — Phil Klay

I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything. — Phil Klay

And that was my homecoming. It was fine, I guess. Getting back feels like your first breath after nearly drowning. Even if it hurts, it's good. — Phil Klay

Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure. — Phil Klay

I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people. — Phil Klay

When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me. — Phil Klay

Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see. — Phil Klay

Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through. — Phil Klay

Veteran art creates a meeting place between veterans and civilians, or simply between veterans with different experiences. — Phil Klay

Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected. — Phil Klay

I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me. — Phil Klay

I did try to write in Iraq, and I failed. I think you just don't have the brain space for it. — Phil Klay

Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative. — Phil Klay

I don't want to act as though my deployment was particularly rough, because it wasn't. I had a very mild deployment; I was a staff officer. — Phil Klay

I'd been in college studying English creative writing and history when I made the decision to join the Marines in the runup to the Iraq war. — Phil Klay

I ended up going to Dartmouth, and I did Marine Officer Candidate School during my junior summer. — Phil Klay

We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific. — Phil Klay

Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking. — Phil Klay

One thing I've always liked about the military is there's a certain amount of pragmatism. — Phil Klay

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

I never thought anyone would pity me because of my time in the Marine Corps. — Phil Klay

[Prayer] will not protect you. It will help your soul. It's for while you're alive. — Phil Klay

The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went. — Phil Klay

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma. — Phil Klay

Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters. — Phil Klay

I like the ethos of the military and the idea of joining an institution in which, at the very least, everyone who signs up believes in something. — Phil Klay

It just feels good to say we're the best team in the world, with the best player in the world. — Klay Thompson

In a strange way, you have to have a certain amount of distance from a thing in order to be able to write about it. — Phil Klay

I grew up a little north of New York City and went to high school at Regis, an all-boys tuition-free high school in Manhattan. — Phil Klay

In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal. — Phil Klay

there are circumstances that trump personal feelings. — Phil Klay

I saw so many radically different versions of Iraq. It would have been difficult for me to come back and think, 'This is the Iraq experience.' — Phil Klay

War is too strange to be processed alone, — Phil Klay

But platitudes are most appealing when they're least appropriate. — Phil Klay

I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not. — Phil Klay

I'm not anti-war. I served in a war, and I served proudly. But just or not, necessary or not, war is the industrial-scale slaughter of other humans. — Phil Klay

Bob, I quickly learned, had an existential view of the Iraq war. — Phil Klay

People have a very political way of looking at war, and that's understandable. — Phil Klay

A great writer is a great writer ... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book. — Phil Klay

Going to war is a rare experience in American culture, so it's easy for simple notions to gain a lot of weight. The reality is always more complex. — Phil Klay

Certainly, when I'd left Iraq back in 2008, I'd been proud of my service, but whether we'd been successful or not was still an open question. — Phil Klay

There's a very particular way that the military speaks. There's a lot of profanity and a lot of acronyms. — Phil Klay

Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings. — Phil Klay

There's a tradition of public service in my family. I'm one of three boys that joined the military. My father was in the Peace Corps. — Phil Klay

I didn't want to write a 'this is how it is' Iraq book, because the Iraq War is an intensely complicated variety of things. — Phil Klay

I have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love. — Phil Klay

Responsibility and accountability is a big part of being in the military. — Phil Klay

I was angry. I'd gotten a lot of Thank You For Your Service handshakes, but nobody really knew what that service meant, you know? — Phil Klay

Fiction offered me tools that allowed me to approach a wider variety of issues than the events of my own life would. — Phil Klay

If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family. — Phil Klay

It's not so much the question that offends me; it's that the people asking it don't seem to respect the moral seriousness of the question. — Phil Klay

War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was. — Phil Klay

We are part of a long tradition of suffering. We can let it isolate us if we want, but we must realize that isolation is a lie. — Phil Klay

We've got some PTSD vets," Sarah says, making it sound like she's keeping them in jars somewhere. — Phil Klay

There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that. — Phil Klay

Sometimes macho language is to mask things people are not ready to deal with. — Phil Klay

War is too strange to process alone. — Phil Klay

I doubt there's anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism. — Phil Klay

'Redeployment' is a military term. It means to transfer a unit from one area to another. — Phil Klay

Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite. — Phil Klay

Even if torture works, what is the point of 'defending' America using a tactic that is a fundamental violation of what America ought to mean? — Phil Klay

You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war. — Phil Klay

Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't. — Phil Klay

It's easier to get people to talk to you if you're a vet and you want to interview a vet about war. Sometimes they open up a little bit easier. — Phil Klay