All they expect from you is your best effort. These Marines think that they are special. They are very well trained, very close knit, and they don't like outsiders. If you want their respect, you will have to earn it.

'The fact is,' I said, 'that you're unable, or unwilling, to believe in the fact that I believe in you.'

...I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved - and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact - and rather deeply wise. More than that, what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Cather's: "We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.

Only a foolish woman would allow her man to earn his living as a moving target.

Love does not exist. There exists the physical need for intercourse, and the rational need for a mate in life.

All of them had a restlessness in common.