Quote

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.

Kevin Powers

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Kevin Powers
Age: 44
Born: 1980
Born: July 11
Novelist
Writer
Richmond
Virginia
Kind
Standards
Things
Failure
Path
Freedom
Fear
Standard
Give
Expectations
Take
Service
Giving
Iraq

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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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My personal opinion is that if someone writes honestly about war, it will inherently be anti-war.
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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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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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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 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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There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told and what is true.
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Writing was always an aspiration, but I'd kept it a secret even from myself.
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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.
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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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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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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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