78 Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes & Sayings with Wallpapers & Posters - Quotes.Pub

Here you will find all the famous Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk quotes. There are more than 78 quotes in our Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes by some of the famous authors like Ben Fountain

Bush, Cheney, Rove, all those guys, they just did what everybody else was doing and I was right there with ’em, chicken as anybody. My problem now is how tough and gung-ho they are, all that bring-it-on crap, I mean, Jesus, show a little humility, people. They ought to be just as careful of your young lives as they were with their own.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

money shaves off a good ten years.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Billy offers small hums of agreement and waits for the momma-logue to wind down.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

the gentle Kathryn thumps the engagement ring in his face, thumps it as you’d thump a spider

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

If a bullet’s going to get you, it’s already been fired.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

And Billy, if it’ll ease your mind any, I want you to know you’ve got a standing offer to come work for me when you’re done with your military service. All you’ve got to do is say the word.” Now there was a depressing thought, although Billy could see how it might come to that, assuming best-case scenario he made it home with all his limbs and faculties intact.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

I think sometimes nothing is better than something. I mean, I’d rather have nothing than let this guy use me like his bitch.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Next thing she knows she’s lying flat on her back and three grizzled Mexicans are standing over her, trying

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

It's going to be a long, lonesome eleven months in Iraq, long and lonesome being the best-case scenario

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

A young man needs to know where he stands in the world, not just as a matter of basic human dignity but as determinants in the ways and means of survival, and what you might hope to gain by application of honest effort—

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

It’s been hard times in America—how did we get this way? So scared all the time,

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

have you not had your morning glass of shut up?

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

They want words. They want contact. They want pictures and autographs. Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all,

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

In a way it’s so easy, all he has to do is say what they want to hear and they’re happy, they love him, everybody gets along. Sometimes he has to remind himself there’s no dishonor in it. He hasn’t told any lies, he doesn’t exaggerate, yet so often he comes away from these encounters with the sleazy, gamey aftertaste of having lied.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Hummer with six doors to a side and black-tinted windows for maximum privacy. “What I’m talking a-bout!” cried Sergeant Dime as he pounced on the bar, everyone whooping over all the pimp finery, but after destroying all hopes for a quick recovery Billy subsides into a gnarled, secret funk. “Billy,” says

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

You make it happen by convincing everyone it’s happening, belief in the first instance being a vaporous construct of duplicity, puff, evasion, cant, and bald-faced lies.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Billy nods and turns to the window. He knows he will never see Faison again, but how can he know? How does anyone ever know anything—the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation. And yet he knows, at least he thinks he knows, he feels it seeded in the purest certainty of his grief as he finds his seat belt and snaps it shut, that snick like the final lock of a vast and complex system. He’s in. Bound for the war. Good-bye, good-bye, good night, I love you all. He sits back, closes his eyes, and tries to think about nothing as the limo takes them away.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes Present moment Quotes

The singing triggers a soft detonation at his core, molten parts of him are flying everywhere and his ears ring to the tune of blast harmonics that only he can hear, but what is “The Star Spangled Banner” if not a love song?

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Hi, you’ve reached Faison! I’m not able to take your call right now…"It makes for an odd sensation, watching her real-time person in the middle distance while holding her disembodied voice to his ear. It puts a frame around the situation, gives it focus, perspective. It makes him aware of himself being aware of himself, and here is a mystery that seems worth thinking about, why this stacking of awareness should even matter. Ant the moment all he knows is that there’s structure in it, a pleasing sense of poise or mental ordering. A kind of knowledge, or maybe a bridge thereto–as if existence didn’t necessarily have to be a moron’s progress of lurching from one damn this to another? As if you might aspire to some sort of context in your life, a condition he associates with adultness. Then comes the beep, and he has to talk.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

This is what he truly envies of these people, the luxury of terror as a talking point, and at this moment he feels so sorry for himself that he could break right down and cry.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Now he laughs for real, cackling with the wicked innocence of the bright and easily bored. Staff Sergeant David Dime is a twenty-four-year-old college dropout from North Carolina who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Maxim, Wired, Harper’s, Fortune, and DicE Magazine, all of which he reads in addition to three or four books a week, mostly used textbooks on history and politics that his insanely hot sister sends from Chapel Hill. There are stories that he went to college on a golf scholarship, which he denies. That he was a star quarterback in high school, which he claims not to remember, though one day a football surfaced at FOB Viper, and Dime, caught up in the moment, perhaps, nostalgia triggering some long-dormant muscle memory, uncorked a sixty-yard spiral that sailed over Day’s head into the base motor pool.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Maybe we need a war now and then to get our priorities straight,” a second man says.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

I like to kill my enemies and listen to the lamentations of their women

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes Enemies Quotes

Inner peace—you need to know who you are, what you want out of life. You have to do your own thinking, and for that you better know who you are, and not just know but be secure in it, comfortable with yourself. Plus you gotta have discipline. Stamina. And luck sure helps. A little luck counts for a lot, including our great good luck of being born into the greatest economic system ever devised. It’s not a perfect system by any means, but overall it’s responsible for tremendous human progress. In just the past century alone, we’ve seen something like a seven-to-one improvement in the standard of living. I’m not saying we don’t have problems, we’ve got a helluva lot of problems, but that’s where the genius of the free market comes in, all the drive and talent and energy that goes into solving those problems.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Fake it till you make it, he reminds himself. This is how he’s survived Army life so far.

Army life Quotes Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

We were at the White House a couple of weeks ago," the man says, "they had a state dinner for Prince Charles and Camilla. Listen, those royals are just the finest people, no pretensions to them whatsoever. You can talk to Prince Charles about anything." Billy nods. There's a silence. Just in time he asks, "What did you talk about?" "Hunting," the man answers.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes Funny Quotes Rich people Quotes Royal family Quotes

Why?' He kept asking in his sweetly belling voice, its tone as pure as marbles swirled around a crystal pail. Why him wun up the tree? Why him nest up theah? Why him gadder nuts? Why? Why? Why? And Billy answering every question to the best of his ability, as if anything less would disrespect the deep and maybe even divine force that drove his little nephew toward universal knowledge.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes Children Quotes

As if sorrow is the true reality? Without ever putting his mind to it, he's come to believe that loss is the standard trajectory.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes Loss Quotes Reality Quotes Sorrow Quotes

There is a vast asymmetry in the dynamic here that Billy can’t quite put his finger on, even though it’s the elephant shitting all over the room.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

No it was my choice. It's what I wanted to do. And I knew they'd probably send me to Iraq. It's not like anybody lied to me."She groans. "Billy, all these mofos ever do is lie. You think if they halfway told the truth we'd even be in a fucking war? You know what I think, I think we don't deserve to have you guys die for us. No country that lets It's leaders lie like that deserves a single soldier to die for it.

Sacrifice Quotes / Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

But a lot of the time that’s how it works, life gets so dark until we think all the light’s gone out of us. But it’s there, it’s always there. If we just open the door a crack the light comes pouring in.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

A harsh thing for any young man to hear, but this is part of every youth’s education in the world, learning the risks are never fully revealed until you commit.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

You could practically see the neurons firing in the kid’s skull. His body was all spring and torque, a bundle of fast-twitch muscles that exuded faint floral whiffs of ripe pear. So much perfection in such a compact little person — Billy had to tackle him from time to time, wrestle him squealing to the ground just to get that little rascal in his hands, just your basic adorable thirty-month old with big blue eyes clear as chlorine pools and Huggies poking out of his stretchy-waist jeans. So is this what they meant by the sanctity of life?

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

America loves to pray, God knows. America prays and prays and prays, it is the land of unchained prayer, and all this ceremonial praying is hard on Billy.

America Quotes Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes Praying Quotes

At the door to the locker room Dime asks [Ennis] to autograph his ball. Ennis rears back. He's chuckling but his eyes are wary. 'Why you want that? I'm just an old equipment hand, nobody cares about my autograph.''As far as I'm concerned you run the team,' Dime answers, so Ennis laughs and takes the Sharpie and signs his name to Dime's ball, and this will be the only autograph that Dime collects today.

Appreciation Quotes / Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and ask every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

America is one big maill with a country attached to it.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

But I am scared. Everybody's scared.""You know what I mean, like scared scared. Like coward scared, like if you never went to begin with. But with everything you've done nobody's going to doubt you." Then she made a somewhat frantic speech about a website she found that listed how certain people had avoided Vietnam. Cheney, Four education deferments, then a hardship 3-A. Limbaugh,4-F thanks to a cyst on his ass. Pat Buchanan, 4-F. Newt Gingrich, grad school deferment. Karl Rove, did not serve. Bill O'Reilly, did not serve. John Ashcroft, did not serve. Bush, AWOL from the Air National Guard, with a check mark in the "do not volunteer" box as to service overseas."You see where I'm going with this?'"Well, yeah.""I'm just saying, those people want a war so bad, they can fight it themselves. Billy Lynn's done his part.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes Hypocrisy Quotes

Coffee? Hell yes, coffee! Caffeine being one of the essential drugs.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

If ever there was a prime-time trigger for PTSD you couldn't do much better than this, but lucky for Norm, the crowd, America, the forty-million-plus TV viewing audience, Bravos can deal, oh yes! Pupils dilated, pulse and blood pressure through the roof, limbs trembling with stress-reflex cortisol rush, but it's cool, it's good, their shit's down tight, no Vietnam-vet crackups for Bravo squad! You can march these boys straight into sound-and-light show hell and Bravos can deal, but damn, isn't it rude to put them through it.

War Quotes / Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes Ptsd Quotes

everybody around here’s such a major conservative till they get sick, get screwed over by their insurance company, their job goes over to China or whatever, then they’re like, ‘Oooooh, what happened?

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

God knows the war sucks, but he sees no great appeal in these tepid peacetime lives.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Don’t talk about shit you don’t know, Billy thinks, and therein lies the dynamic of all such encounters, the Bravos speak from the high ground of experience. They are authentic. They are the Real. They have dealt much death and received much death and smelled it and held it and slopped through it in their boots, had it spattered on their clothes and tasted it in their mouths. That is their advantage, and given the masculine standard America has set for itself it is interesting how few actually qualify. Why we fight, yo, who is this we? Here in the chicken-hawk nation of blowhards and bluffers, Bravo always has the ace of bloods up its sleeve.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

So perhaps, it occurs to Billy, this is the whole point of civilization, the eating of beautiful meals and the taking of decorous dumps, in which case he is for it, having had a bellyful of the other way.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Without ever exactly putting his mind to it, he's come to believe that loss is standard trajectory. Something new appears in the world—a baby, say, or a car or a house, or an individual shows some special talent—with luck and huge expenditures of soul and effort you might keep the project stoked for a while, but eventually, ultimately, it's going down. This is a truth so brutally self-evident that he can't fathom why it's not more widely perceived, hence his contempt for the usual public shock and outrage when a particular situation goes to hell.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Mortal fear is the ghetto of the human soul, to be free of it something like the psychic equivalent of inheriting a hundred million dollars.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes

It was the sixties, exactly, all we wanted to do was to smoke a lot of dope and ball a lot of chicks. Vietnam, excuse me? Why would I wanna go get my ass shot off in some stinking rice paddy just so Nixon can have his four more years? Screw that, and I wasn't the only one who felt that way. All the big warmongers these days who took a pass on Vietnam, look, I'd be the last person on earth to start casting blame. Bush, Cheney, Rove, all those guys, they just did what everybody else was doing and I was right there with 'em, chicken as anybody. My problem now is how tough and gung-ho they are, all that bring it on crap, I mean, Jesus, show a little humility, people. They ought to be just as careful of your young lives as they were with their own.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Quotes Hypocrisy Quotes

1
2