Steve Southerland Quotes

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

When I was 19, I was in a horrific car accident, and it taught me that at the end of our life, we ask all these questions. And my questions, I discovered, were: Did I really live my life? Did I love? Did I matter? And I was unhappy with the answers.

Sometimes I feel like a has-been who never was.

I'm inhabiting a life I'm not supposed to be in... and at certain times in my life, I have felt a wrongness. And not a moral wrongness but a sense that this isn't what I was born to be doing.

I think essentially the meaning of life is probably the journey and not really any one thing or an outcome or a result.

Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

Every day, people settle for less than they deserve. They are only partially living or at best living a partial life. Every human being has the potential for greatness.

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

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.

I never really had a teenage experience. I went from childhood to maturity, and in some ways, it short-circuited me emotionally.

The battalion, the whole battalion was affected by the two killed just within a week of being there, and I think that that pulled everybody up to make them realise that this was a very serious business.

My character, Rick Spleen, is a what-if version of me, really, where nothing did quite turn out right and everything else is still around the corner.

I worry whether it's not really the best way to live one's life - trying to fulfill the dreams you had as a child. Maybe it's quite a backwards approach.

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end; it has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.

I'm actually not a particularly negative person, but I feel like most things are better when they're not actualized. The motivation that comes from wanting something is so much more driving of people than actually getting it.

It's good to focus on the universal suffering that goes on in any war. Whatever the right and wrongs of the war, there is always universal suffering.

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.

Man always dies before he is fully born.

Every war has its demons.

My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.

One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'

War is never cheap or easy.

I have been through one war. I have seen the dead piled up and I do not want to see another.