Mark Bowden Quotations

She would talk to patients, hold patients' hands, try to find supplies for us. She would do whatever she could.

He essentially betrayed many of those people who had relied on him.

He sees himself as the figure whose name will be revered ... hundreds of years from now in Arab culture and Arab history.

Staring at all the green bundles, ... Joey felt suddenly overwhelmed by the challenge of hanging onto it. The idea of finding that much money was proving to be more thrilling than the actual experience, much as the highs he got by shooting speed had long ago stopped living up to his expectations. The hard truth about life, which most people learned but that Joey had not, was that things had to be earned to be fully enjoyed. Success, accomplishment, the admiration of the world -- these were all things that could not be faked, or purchased with a needle or a windfall.

To me, this says: 'I'm a survivor. I'm proud to be an American. Things like that left me amazed at how resilient those people are.

The question posed by Yossarian in 'Catch-22,' ... is one of the great questions of modern times: Is this huge industrial military that we've constructed, has it become more deadly and powerful than the cause for which is was constructed?

There's just a stench of things rotting, decaying - dead seafood, poultry, other things I can't talk about. It gets into your nose; it gets into your clothes. You can't get away from it.

That's why I'm going to go back next year, to have a little reunion. I saw these people when they were down, and I want to see them when they rebuild. If they were this good when they were down, I can't wait to see what they do when they're back on the upswing.

There were signs everywhere saying, 'If you loot, we shoot,' ... The first looter we had, they had ripped his ear off. They really tore him up.

The tsunami did provoke an extraordinary response and got us thinking of new measures.

These people couldn't thank us enough. They had lost their employers, their homes, their cars, and here they were trying to give us what little bit they still had. One man had nothing but watermelon cut up, and he kept trying to give us some.

I'm tired of the FEMA-bashing. All you hear is that FEMA didn't do enough. What people don't understand is that FEMA had a game plan, but when the devastation was so widespread, their game plan kind of went out the window.

If you go down there and see that, and you're not more appreciative of what you've got and how lucky you are, there is something wrong with you.

I remember sitting on my back porch, starting to read it, and thinking, 'I wonder what this is about?'

These problems have been here so long that the only way I’ve been able to function at all is by learning to ignore them. Else I would be in a constant state of panic, unable to think or act constructively.

...Which brings me to the Hubble Space Telescope's newest images. If it's wonder that you're looking for, and mystery, don't just scan the photographs. Stop and think about them. Try to imagine the scale. The Earth is just a speck of dust on one distant whirling tentacle of the Milky Way galaxy, which contains billions of stars. A 'collision' of galaxies seems unimaginably large - and yet it is something scientists long ago imagined... The imaginings of pseudoscience are feeble by comparison.

Do me a favor, okay? Tell my parents that I fought well today. And tell them that I... that I... that I fought hard.

Excited. In a good way. I've been training my whole life for this.

No one gets left behind, you know that.

It's what you do right now that makes a difference.