Michael F. Flynn Quotes

He could not live again in Paris. It had seemed better then only because he had been younger, and had not yet known contentment.

He dyed his hair with great art, maintaining enough gray to suggest wisdom, but not so much as to suggest age.

The stories I have to tell are not for the ears of youngsters. What were the stories, really? A crowd of men charged from the trench. Later, some of them came back. What more was there to say? Once, a long time ago, war had been glamorous, with pageantry and uniforms to shame a peacock. Now it was only necessary, and the uniforms were the color of mud.

Men afraid may see demons in the familiar, and direct their fear of the insensible to a fear of the sensible."
"Thought-lacking!"
"So it is; but it is what folk do.

He believed because he wanted to believe. And that, too, is madness.

There seemed no face within the cowl, only a black emptiness, and the notion sprang irresistibly to Dietrich’s mind that this was Death, now these dozen years overdue, treading a weary mountain trail in search of him. Then a flash of white showed within the shadow and Dietrich realized that it was only the angle of the sun that had made that hood seem so empty.

What the prisoner said made some sense. He could see how technological progress—and social change with it—was coupled with free trade and the free exchange of ideas. Yet, he wasn’t at all sure that it was necessarily a good thing. There was a lot to be said for stability and continuity.

As often happens, fear showed itself in hostility.

I know my equations are true," she mused aloud. "I need to know if they are fact.

She said nothing, but said it loudly.

You split hairs."
"Better to split hairs than the heads beneath them.

He read the document a second time, but the words had not changed.

No field of knowledge is so transparently simple as another’s.

The philosophy of the likelihood of events concludes that folk from different worlds must have different forms.

Had you learned to flatter the Kaiser, you would need not live in the back woods."
"Had you learned to live in the back woods, you would need not flatter the Kaiser.