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I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.

Kevin Powers

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Kevin Powers
Age: 44
Born: 1980
Born: July 11
Novelist
Writer
Richmond
Virginia
Bird
Understood
War
Experience
Representation
Would
Intended
Yellow
Peculiar
Birds

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To understand the world, one’s place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning.
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As human beings, we have the blessing and the curse that we're able to adapt to almost anything. No matter how extreme the circumstances you're in, they become normal.
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I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.
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All choices are illusions, or if they are not illusions their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all the other men and women deciding anything in that moment.
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My personal opinion is that if someone writes honestly about war, it will inherently be anti-war.
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Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.
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The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren't any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood.
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Writing was always an aspiration, but I'd kept it a secret even from myself.
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There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told and what is true.
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I had the feeling that if I encountered anyone they would intuit my disgrace and would judge me instantly. Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history. At least that's what I thought. Now I know: all pain is the same. Only the details are different.
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It's not just: you get off the plane, you're back home, everything's fine. Maybe the physical danger ends, but soldiers are still deeply at risk of being injured in a different way.
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One of the things my service in Iraq did give me was this freedom from fear of failure or any kind of expectations that I had to take a standard path.
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The world makes liars of us all.
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I think a lot of the guys I know and a lot of people I've talked to, what they want is very often what most people want, a kind of simple life, a livelihood, a family, people who care about them, people they can care about. I think vets on the whole want the same things that everybody else does.
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In a lot of ways, the task at hand for any poem is to approach something that defies exactness or definition with a kind of exactness or precision.
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I'm always most interested in writing about things that I don't understand.
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The war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on.
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I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn't mind. The world makes liars of us all.
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Noises and smells, those can bring back powerful memories. I remember when I was going to school one Fourth of July, and there were a lot of fireworks going off. I knew that I was in Richmond. I knew that I was a college student. But I thought people were shooting at me.
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