- "Willis Seward Keith stepped out of the sunshine across the threshold. It was done as easily and noiselessly as Alice's stepping through the looking glass; and like Alice, Willie Keith passed into a new and exceedingly strange world."
-Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny
- "If you want to know, what I've studied seems to me a lot of rubbish. The rules, the lingo, strike me as comical. The idea of men spending their lives in this make-believe appalls me."
-Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny - "It seems to me that you're very much like our whole country-young, naïve, spoiled, and softened by abundance and good luck, but with an interior hardness that comes from your sound stock."
-Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny
- "The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you're not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one."
-Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny - "War is a business in which a lot of people watch a few people get killed and are damn glad it wasn't them."
-Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny - "I'll tell you this, the same things seem goddamn different in the middle of a typhoon when they're happening, and six thousand miles away in the Federal Office Building when you're talking about them-"
-Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny - "Queeg deserved better at my hands."
-Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny - "See Willie, there is one lousy thing about having brains. Makes me worse off than Queeg. He could swallow all his own feeble self-protecting lies because he was a stupid man. But I can analyze. I'm imprisoned forever by the fact that I jumped."
-Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny
- "Everybody's life pivots on one or maybe two moments."
-Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny - "Every hour spent on the Caine was a great hour in all our lives-if you don't think so now you will later on, more and more."
-Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny