Top 35 Kevin Powers Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Freedom is not the same as lack of accountability.”

— Kevin Powers

2. “There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told and what is true.”

— Kevin Powers

3. “As human beings, we have the blessing and the curse that we’re able to adapt to almost anything. No matter how extreme the circumstances you’re in, they become normal.”

— Kevin Powers

4. “Joining the military is not to be taken lightly. You’re putting every part of yourself at risk, not just your body but your moral and spiritual centre.”

— Kevin Powers

5. “I understood that ‘The Yellow Birds’ would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.”

— Kevin Powers

6. “The world makes liars of us all.”

— Kevin Powers

7. “It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn’t much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow.”

— Kevin Powers

8. “I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn’t mind. The world makes liars of us all.”

— Kevin Powers

9. “All pain is the same. Only the details are different.”

— Kevin Powers

10. “The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren’t any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood.”

— Kevin Powers

11. “Noises and smells, those can bring back powerful memories. I remember when I was going to school one Fourth of July, and there were a lot of fireworks going off. I knew that I was in Richmond. I knew that I was a college student. But I thought people were shooting at me.”

— Kevin Powers

12. “To understand the world, one’s place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning.”

— Kevin Powers

13. “All choices are illusions, or if they are not illusions their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all the other men and women deciding anything in that moment.”

— Kevin Powers

14. “I understand that it’s incredibly difficult to watch what’s happening on the news every day and not become inured to it. I’ve fallen victim to that myself, wanting to look away.”

— Kevin Powers

15. “I wanted to go to sleep and stay there, that’s all. A passive wish, one I didn’t push. Sure, there is a fine line between not wanting to wake up and actually wanting to kill yourself, and while I discovered you can walk that line for a long while without even noticing, anybody who is around you surely will...”

— Kevin Powers

16. “I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.”

— Kevin Powers

17. “Towards parties and the banks of streams and ponds, along which young boys would pace out hours in silence after taking the freckled shoulders of those girls into their hands, their hands feeling skin... and not knowing what to do, those same hands folding as if in prayer, praying without even knowing they are praying “God please don’t let the world be always slipping from me.”

— Kevin Powers

18. “I wanted something that I could look back on and say, yes, you were fighting too, you burned to be alive, and whatever failure or accident of nature caused you to be killed could be explained by something other than the fact that I’d missed your giving up.”

— Kevin Powers

19. “I had the feeling that if I encountered anyone they would intuit my disgrace and would judge me instantly. Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history. At least that’s what I thought. Now I know: all pain is the same. Only the details are different.”

— Kevin Powers

20. “I’m always most interested in writing about things that I don’t understand.”

— Kevin Powers

21. “It’s not just: you get off the plane, you’re back home, everything’s fine. Maybe the physical danger ends, but soldiers are still deeply at risk of being injured in a different way.”

— Kevin Powers

22. “Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn’t seem to be much difference in my own writing.”

— Kevin Powers

23. “To continue, I had to see the world with clear eyes, to focus on the essential. We only pay attention to rare things, and death was not rare.”

— Kevin Powers

24. “We were not destined to survive. The fact is, we were not destined at all.”

— Kevin Powers

25. “The details of the world in which we live are always secondary to the fact that we must live in them.”

— Kevin Powers

26. “But things happened the way they happened without regard to our desire for them to have happened another way. Despite an age-old instinct to provide an explanation more complex than that, something with a level of profundity and depth which would seem commensurate with the confusion I felt, it really was that simple.”

— Kevin Powers

27. “For one brief incalculable moment we were not brave or afraid.”

— Kevin Powers

28. “I’ve been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.”

— Kevin Powers

29. “A moment is never long enough to account for tragedy when you are in it.”

— Kevin Powers

30. “I think a lot of the guys I know and a lot of people I’ve talked to, what they want is very often what most people want, a kind of simple life, a livelihood, a family, people who care about them, people they can care about. I think vets on the whole want the same things that everybody else does.”

— Kevin Powers

31. “There was no center to the world. The curves of all our bells are cracked.”

— Kevin Powers

32. “Minutes ticked into the past.”

— Kevin Powers

33. “One of the things my service in Iraq did give me was this freedom from fear of failure or any kind of expectations that I had to take a standard path.”

— Kevin Powers

34. “Writing was always an aspiration, but I’d kept it a secret even from myself.”

— Kevin Powers

35. “I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive.”

— Kevin Powers

36. “I had feared the truth on her behalf and it had not been my right to make that choice for her.”

— Kevin Powers

37. “I can’t envision an honest war novel that left war in a positive light.”

— Kevin Powers

38. “I would only sit muttering with envy for their broad umbrellas, their dryness, and the sweet, unwounded banality of their lives.”

— Kevin Powers

39. “But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed.”

— Kevin Powers