Writing: the long and the short of it

[Marlow]

The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriotic grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Great scene in Apocalypse Now, when the General is ordering Willard to 'terminate' Col. Kurtz's command:

Well, you see Willard... In this war, things get confused out there, power, ideals, the old morality, practical military necessity. But out there with these natives it must be a temptation to be god. Because there's a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph. Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called 'the better angels of our nature'. Every man has got a breaking point. You and I have one. Walter Kurtz has reached his. And very obviously, he has gone insane.

[Conor Dary]

'Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called 'the better angels of our nature'.

Which of course reminds me of Michael Shaara's wonderful novel The Killer Angels.

[Per Andersen]

My favorite Hemingway line: "In the fall the war was still there, but we did not go to it anymore."

I'll just have to complete this first paragraph from Hemingway's "In another Country" as it is just about my favorite piece of writing in all his short stories.

"It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains"

[26mi235]

Garry Wills wrote a superb book on the speech. Definitely worth a read.

http://www.amazon.com/Lincoln-Gettysbur ... arry+wills

I will second this. It is a brief book, one that most here can knock of quickly.