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Book: The Naked and the Dead
Quotes of Book: The Naked and the Dead

Norman Mailer _ The Naked and the Dead
Margaret is kindled by it, exalted for a time, sees it as passion, glows and becomes rounded, but only for a time. After a year it is completely naked, apparent to her, that he is alone, that he fights out battles with himself upon her body, and something withers in her.
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Norman Mailer _ The Naked and the Dead
lofting itself massively into the low-hanging clouds of the sky. In the early drab twilight it looked like an immense old gray elephant erecting himself somberly on his front legs, his haunches lost in the green bedding of his lair. The mountain seemed wise and powerful, and terrifying in its size. Gallagher stared at it in absorption, caught by a sense of beauty he could not express. The idea, the vision he always held of something finer and neater and more beautiful than the moil in which he lived trembled now, pitched almost to a climax of words. There
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Norman Mailer _ The Naked and the Dead
His nerves were more keyed than he had realized. "Quit the bitching and let's go," he heard himself piping. He was damn tired of them, he realized suddenly. "That sonofabitch," one of them muttered. It shocked him, and generated resentment. He repressed it, however. What they were doing was understandable enough. In the fatigue of the march, they had to have someone to blame, and no matter what he did they would hate him sooner or later. His approach would end by confusing and annoying them. Croft they would obey, for Croft satisfied their desire for hatred, encouraged it, was superior to it, and in turn exacted obedience. The realization depressed him.
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Norman Mailer _ The Naked and the Dead
She was a good girl, he said to himself. He was thinking without quite phrasing it that no other person had ever understood him so fully, and he felt a secret relief as he realized that she had understood him and still loved him.
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Norman Mailer _ The Naked and the Dead
He had been given the job and he was going to do it. But now for the first time he hated it genuinely. Perhaps there had been too many fatigue-products, perhaps the cumulative labor had dissolved and reshaped the structures of his mind, but in any case he was wretched with this work, and as a corollary he understood suddenly that he had always hated the drudgery of his farm work, the unending monotonous struggle against an arid unyielding soil.
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Norman Mailer _ The Naked and the Dead
If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes watered. The only way you generate the proper attitude of awe and obedience is through immense and disproportionate power.
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Norman Mailer _ The Naked and the Dead
You men are a bunch of god-damned women.
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Norman Mailer _ The Naked and the Dead
About a week after they had come back, a load of mail came to the island. They were the first letters the men had received in several weeks, and for a night it relieved the changeless pattern of their lives. One of the infrequent rations of beer was given out the same night, and the men finished their three cans quickly, and sat about without saying very much. The beer had been far too inadequate to make them drunk; it made them only moody and reflective, it opened the gate to all their memories, and left them sad, hungering for things they could not name.
book-quote war
Norman Mailer _ The Naked and the Dead
Or, obversely, he might kill a man himself. It would be a question of throwing up his rifle, pressing the trigger, and a particular envelope of lusts and anxieties and perhaps some goodness would be quite dead. All as easy as stepping on an insect, perhaps easier…Everything was completely out of whack, none of the joints fitted. The men had been singing in the motor pool, and there had been something nice about it, something childish and brave. And they were here on this road, a point moving along in a line in the vast neutral spaces of the jungle. And somewhere else a battle might be going on. The artillery, the small-arms fire they had been hearing constantly, might be nothing, something scattered along the front, or it might be all concentrated now in the minuscule inferno of combat. None of it matched. The night had broken them into all the isolated units that actually they were."
book-quote wwii
Norman Mailer _ The Naked and the Dead
It was probably a damn sight easier than getting rid of a woman who had found something in him that he didn't have or he didn't care to give.
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Norman Mailer _ The Naked and the Dead
Goldstein, you'd be a pretty good boy if you wasn't so chicken.
book-quote cowardice
Norman Mailer _ The Naked and the Dead
Hearn's death was happily smudged, or at least on the surface, but ever since the second ambush he had been feeling the apprehension of a man in a dream who knows he is guilty, is waiting for his punishment, and cannot remember his crime.
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