Why We Love Mark Helprin (IV)

The problem with war, as I have seen it, is not so much that it makes misery and grief - all of which would tend to come anyway, in time. The sin is in the abruptness, in the abridgement of those stages that otherwise might be joined so brilliantly to make a life.

-- A Soldier of the Great War, X (La Rondine, p. 802)