“Lucky is the spouse who dies first, who never has to know what survivors endure.”

“In any man who dies there dies with him,
his first snow and kiss and fight.”

“Only a fool loves war. Or a man who has never seen it. The trouble is that the survivors forget about the horrors and remember only the battle lust. They pass on that memory, and other men hunger for it.”

“Conan sensed their uncertainty and grinned mirthlessly and ferociously. "Who dies first?"”

“It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.”

“… after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?”

“Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.”

“How horrifying that morning when you wake up and your first thought is not of the person who has left. That’s when you know, I will never die of a broken heart.”

“The first one is always the hardest," he said.
"The first?"
"The first one you love who dies," he said. "It gets easier, after.”

“If everyone who claims to be a survivor actually is one,’ my mother used to exclaim, ‘who did Hitler kill then?”