The Red Badge of Courage Quotes
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Source: The Red Badge of Courage
Author: Stephen Crane
"The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting."
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors.
Context
You're looking at the opening line of The Red Badge of Courage—and, boy, does it make an impression.
We readers are given our first vision of the resting armies, and it's quite a grand one, what with the fog and the green and the rumors.
Ominous, no?
A contemporary reader would understand that the narrator is talking about the Civil War, but where exactly these armies and the subsequent battles happen is never clear. Unlike past war stories (and unlike the tone set by these first lines), this novel was one of the first to focus on a single individual's experience in war, as opposed to viewing it from a more grand (and removed) scale of generals and army movements.
We can immediately tell what a bleak world we're in, what with all the cold and foggy brownness. Henry Fleming, the novel's protagonist, will soon be confronted with the gruesomeness of war, and any ideas of heroics and general machoism and grandeur will be replaced with doubt and fear.
Where you've heard it
Probably only in the novel.
Pretentious Factor
If you were to drop this quote at a dinner party, would you get an in-unison "awww" or would everyone roll their eyes and never invite you back? Here it is, on a scale of 1-10.
Out of context, you're going to get a bunch of strange looks.