I got to tell you, that if it weren't for that harmonica music, I might have just packed up and gone home, but it made me feel so good, I can hardly describe it. Sort of like my whole body is the harmonica and the music give me goosebumps when I play it.

— Winston Groom

I have suffered a loss, Forrest, far greater than my legs. It's my spirit, my soul, if you will. There is only a blank there now - medals where my soul used to be.

— Winston Groom

It commenced raining one day and did not stop for two months. We went through ever different kind of rain they are, CEP'n maybe sleet or hail. It was little tiny stinging rain sometimes, a big ole fat rain at others. It came sidewise a straight down a sometimes even seem to stand up from the ground. Nevertheless, we are expected to do our shit, which was mainly walking upland down the hills a stuff looking for gooks.

— Winston Groom

I think that sitting there talking to Dan was a thing that had a great impression on my life. I know that being an idiot and all, I ain't supposed to have no philosophy of my own, but maybe it's just because nobody never to the time to talk to me about it. It was Dan's philosophy that everything that happen to us, or for that matter, to anything everywhere, is controlled by natural laws that govern the universe. His views were extremely complicated, but the gist of what he said begun to change my whole outlook on things.

— Winston Groom

Let me say this: being an idiot is no box of chocolates. People laugh, lose patience, treat you shabby. Now they say folks supposed to be kind to the afflicted, but let me tell you this - it ain't always that way. Even so, I got no complaints, because I reckon I'm done live a pretty interesting life, so to speak.

— Winston Groom

Life is like a box of chocolates.

— Winston Groom

One day we found them. They most of been holding a gook convention or something, cause it seems like the same sort of deal as when you step on an anthill, and they all come swarming around.

— Winston Groom

So the next day I asked Dan how is it that Bubba can get killed, and what kind of half-assed nature law would allow that. He thought about it for a while, and said, 'Well, I'll tell you, Forrest, all of these laws are not specially pleasing to us. But there are laws nonetheless. Like when a tiger pounce on a monkey in the jungle - bad for the money, but good for the tiger. That is just the way it is.

— Winston Groom

There was a guy next to my cot name of Dan, who had been blew up inside a tank. He was all burnt and had tubes going in and out of him everyplace, but I never heard him holler. He talks real low and quiet, and after a day or so, him and me got to be friends. Dan came from the state of Connecticut, and he was a teacher of history when they grabbed him up and threw him into the Army. But because he was smart, they sent him to officer school and made him a lieutenant. Most of the lieutenants I know were about as simple-minded as me, but Dan was different. He had his own philosophy about why we were here, which was that we were doing maybe the wrong thing for the right reasons, or vice versa, but whatever it is, we ain't doing it right. Him being a tank officer and all, he says it ridiculous for us to be waging a war in a place where we can hardly use our tanks on account of the land is mostly swamp or mountains. I told him about Bubba and all, and he nods his head very sadly and said there will be a lot more Bubba's to die before this thing is over.

— Winston Groom

There was some people hurt far iller than I was in that hospital, let me tell you. Poor old boys with arms and legs and hands and who knows what else missing. Boys what had been shot in their stomach and chests and faces. At night the place sound like a torture chamber - them fellers be howling and crying and calling for their mamas.

— Winston Groom