Top 40 Karl Marlantes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Quitting is unthinkable and pain is just weakness leaving the body.”

— Karl Marlantes

2. “Once we recognize our shadow’s existence we must resist the enticing step of going with its flow.”

— Karl Marlantes

3. “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

4. “When the peace treaty is signed, the war isn’t over for the veterans, or the family. It’s just starting.”

— Karl Marlantes

5. “War is society’s dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults.”

— Karl Marlantes

6. “Matterhorn is my metaphor of the Vietnam War – we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again.”

— Karl Marlantes

7. “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

8. “His killing that day would not have been evil if the dead soldiers hadn’t been loved by mothers, sisters, friends, wives. Mellas understood that in destroying the fabric that linked those people, he had participated in evil, but this evil had hurt him as well. He also understood that his participation in evil, was a result of being human.”

— Karl Marlantes

9. “I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That’s my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.”

— Karl Marlantes

10. “The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn’t teach me how to deal with killing.”

— Karl Marlantes

11. “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

12. “Vietnam was the first time that Americans of different races had to depend on each other. In the Second World War, they were segregated; it was in Vietnam that American integration happened in the military – and it wasn’t easy.”

— Karl Marlantes

13. “I mean, if you’re proud of what you’ve done when you’ve served in the military, well then we call that bragging. And if you are unhappy about what happened, we call that complaining. And so what are you going to do?”

— Karl Marlantes

14. “I began writing ‘Matterhorn’ in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript.”

— Karl Marlantes

15. “Hawke had learned long ago that what really mattered in combat was what people were like when they were exhausted.”

— Karl Marlantes

16. “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

17. “Dying this way was a better way to die because living this way was a better way to live. The.”

— Karl Marlantes

18. “He knew that all of them were shadows: the chanters, the dead, the living. All shadows, moving across this landscape of mountains and valleys, changing the pattern of things as they moved but leaving nothing changed when they left. Only the shadows themselves could change.”

— Karl Marlantes

19. “The time for debilitating fear is before and after the mission.”

— Karl Marlantes

20. “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

21. “We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy body for its own sake.”

— Karl Marlantes

22. “Being human was the best he could do. Without man there would be no evil. But there was also no good, nothing moral built over the world of fact. Humans were responsible for it all.”

— Karl Marlantes

23. “So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.”

— Karl Marlantes

24. “When I first got back from the war, I said, ‘I’m gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.’ So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.”

— Karl Marlantes

25. “I don’t want any romantics to go into the military. I’m not a pacifist. I think we need a military, and the better one we have, the better off we are. I don’t want kids going in there thinking that it’s John Wayne on Iwo Jima. That’s not healthy.”

— Karl Marlantes

26. “He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn’t evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.”

— Karl Marlantes

27. “Everything is touched by the holy when it is in the presence of death.”

— Karl Marlantes

28. “And I think that it’s – the military has actually made improvements, so people are considering post-traumatic stress disorder as, at the least, a possible psychological problem. You know, when I was in Vietnam, it was just considered malingering. And we’re making progress.”

— Karl Marlantes

29. “Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well, especially once I got serious about writing.”

— Karl Marlantes

30. “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

31. “When you are confronted with a seemingly painless moral choice, the odds are that you haven’t looked deeply enough.”

— Karl Marlantes

32. “Running to join them, he felt overwhelming joy. It was as if he were coming home from a lashing winter storm to the warmth of his living room. The sky seemed brilliantly blue and clear, although he knew it was overcast. If he didn’t move his legs faster, his heart would outpace his feet and burst. His heart, his whole body, was overflowing with an emotion that he could only describe as love.”

— Karl Marlantes

33. “Meaning came out of living. Meaning could only come from his choices and actions. Meaning was made, not discovered.”

— Karl Marlantes

34. “Emotion constricted Hawke’s throat. He suddenly understood why the victims of concentration camps had walked quietly to the gas chambers. In the face of horror and insanity, it was the one human thing to do. Not the noble thing, not the heroic thing – the human thing. To live succumbing to the insanity, was the ultimate loss of pride.”

— Karl Marlantes

35. “Power was the ability to reward and punish. Henry could reward with money and drugs. He could punish by withholding money and drugs. A nice combination. Ultimately, however, Henry wielded the power of punishment held only by a self-selected few. He was willing to murder. China knew that if a man could kill someone, everyone knew that he could kill anyone. The only way to stand up to that kind of power was to be willing to die.”

— Karl Marlantes

36. “Mellas was transported outside himself, beyond himself. It was as if his mind watched eveything coolly while his body raced wildly with passion and fear. He was frightened beyond any fear he had ever known. But this brilliant and intense fear, this terrible here and now, combined with the crucial significance of every movement of his body, pushed him over a barrier whose existence he had not known about until this moment. He gave himself over completely to the god of war within him.”

— Karl Marlantes

37. “A Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, came to America more than a century ago and made some astute observations about the American way. He said that we have a misleading idea at the very head of our Constitution: the pursuit of happiness. One can not pursue happiness; if he does he obscures it. If he will proceed with the human task of life, the relocation of the center of gravity of the personality to something greater outside itself, happiness will be the outcome.”

— Karl Marlantes

38. “Then, like a seaborne Sisyphus, the ship clawed to the top of the next towering wave, as the sailors fought gravity and slippery decks to maintain their balance and their lives.”

— Karl Marlantes

39. “The only thing that hurts about a rebuke is the truth.”

— Karl Marlantes

40. “It occurred to Mellas that he could create the possibility of good or evil through caring. He could nullify the indifferent world. But in so doing he opened himself up to the pain of watching it get blown away.”

— Karl Marlantes

41. “But men did what was expected of them or they weren’t men. It was that simple.”

— Karl Marlantes

42. “Christians only want Christmas not Good Friday.” She went into the whiny voice again. ““God is bad, boo-hoo.” She looked him in the eye. “God is the center of the world, not you. You grow up.”

— Karl Marlantes

43. “When the child asks, “What is it like to go to war?” To remain silent keeps you from coming home.”

— Karl Marlantes

44. “With those you love, you accept that there are only two ways you will not get hurt when you lose them. You stop loving them or you die first.”

— Karl Marlantes

45. “The smart guy gives the guy with the power the credit, whether he deserves it or not. That way the smart guy is dangling something the boss wants. So the smart guy now has power over the boss.”

— Karl Marlantes