William March
Overview
William March was an American author and a highly decorated US Marine
United States Marine Corps
The United States Marine Corps is a branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for providing power projection from the sea, using the mobility of the United States Navy to deliver combined-arms task forces rapidly. It is one of seven uniformed services of the United States...

. The author of six novels and four short-story collections, March was praised by critics and heralded as "the unrecognized genius of our time", without attaining popular appeal until after his death.

March grew up in rural Alabama
Alabama
Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...

 in a family so poor that he could not finish regular high school. He later studied law, but was unable to afford finishing his studies.
Quotations

...man...is a frail, lost creature, too weak to walk unaided.

If the common soldiers of each army could just get together by a river bank and talk things over calmly, no war could possibly last as long as a week.

I have never ceased to wonder at the thing we call human nature, with its times of beauty and its times of filthiness, or at the level of calm stupidity that lies in between the two.

...To me it has always seemed that God is so sickened with men, and their unending cruelty to each other, that he covers the places where they have been as quickly as possible.

People are born in sorrow and move about the earth in patterns of sorrow without sense and without plan. Why should I take myself so seriously? I am no more important to the Creator than the trees or the vegetation which live with me on His earth. There is no eye to watch over me nor a hand to direct me, and there will be no preferred fate for me at the end, no matter what I am, or what I do with my life.

In the sight of my beloved, I am like iron that the smith has heated at his furnace: iron whose surface gives heat. I am a bar that is rigid and will not bend.

Everybody must seem crazy if you see deep enough into their minds.

 
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