War & Peace Quote by George Kennedy

Kennedy frames something grimly mundane - hearing loss - with the matter-of-fact candor of a man who’s lived in loud places and doesn’t feel the need to romanticize them. The opening, "Of course", is doing quiet work: it treats war’s aftermath as an almost expected footnote, the kind of damage you mention the way you mention a bad knee. That casualness isn’t denial so much as a generational performance of toughness, a style of masculinity where pain is acknowledged only in passing and never milked for sentiment.

The line also sneaks in an argument about causality and blame. By splitting the reason into "heredity and noise exposure", Kennedy resists the clean narrative audiences love: the heroic veteran wounded by combat. He offers a composite explanation that’s both personal and clinical. "Heredity" naturalizes the loss, making it feel inevitable; "noise exposure" reintroduces history, implying the state and its wars leave marks that can’t be fully filed under bad luck. The phrasing keeps him from sounding accusatory while still pointing to the obvious culprit: artillery, gunfire, the industrial roar of twentieth-century warfare.

As an actor - a profession built on voice, timing, and listening - the detail lands as more than trivia. Hearing loss becomes an invisible cost with professional stakes, a reminder that war doesn’t just take lives; it takes the subtle tools people use to make a living and connect. The intent is modest, but the subtext is huge: survival isn’t clean, and damage comes in layers.