|
bb9a3aa
|
If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote.
|
|
truth
voting
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
3c6b862
|
The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
fc9c5bd
|
And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
f4fd363
|
What happened, and what might have happened?
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
dd5f194
|
A miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences . . . a miracle. . . . An act of high imagination -- daring and lurid and impossible. Yes, a cartoon of the mind.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
9ddd76d
|
My heart tells me to stop right here, to offer quiet benediction and call it the end. But the truth won't allow it. Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. Nothing is fixed, nothing solved. the facts, such as they are, finally spin off into the void of things missing, the inconclusiveness of us. Who are we? Where do we go? The ambiguity may be dissatisfying, even irritating, but this is a love story. There is no tidiness. Blame it on t..
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
e8bf125
|
With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
3dc8089
|
In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.
|
|
virtue
direct
simplistic
slow
intentions
fat
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
f867eb9
|
It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty... Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference- a powerful, implacable beauty- and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
f19bbcc
|
One morning in Saigon she'd asked what it was all about 'This whole war,' she said, 'why was everybody so mad at everybody else?' I shook my head. 'They weren't mad exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing.' 'What did you want?' 'Nothing,' I said. 'To stay alive.' 'That's all?' 'Yes.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
05455b0
|
Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love. And it was real. When I write about her now, three decades later, it's tempting to dismiss it as a crush, an infatuation of childhood, but I know for a fact that what we felt for each other was as deep and rich as love can ever get. It had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love, and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to com..
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
a90e187
|
She'd say amazing things sometimes. "Once you're alive," she'd say, "you cant ever be dead."
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
36a47aa
|
We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it, and hold it forever inaccessible. ("I love you," someone says, and instantly we begin to wonder - "Well, how much?" - and when the answer comes - "with my whole heart" - we then wonder about the wholeness of the a fickle heart.) Our lovers, our husbands, our fathers, our gods - they a..
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
9142441
|
Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
5dd366b
|
There is always the threat of tomorrow's treachery, or next year's treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that.
|
|
treachery
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
5421737
|
Mitchell sanders was sitting under a banyan tree and using a thumbnail to pry off all the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing them in a USO envelope. When he was done he sealed the envelope, wrote 'Free' in the right hand corner, and sent it to his draft board in ohio.
|
|
humor
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
bb0e72f
|
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again. 'Daddy, tell the truth,'Kathleen can say, 'did you ever kill anybody?' And I can say, honest, 'Of course not.' Or I can say, honestly, 'Yes.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
9f5c93b
|
I learned that words make a difference. It's easier to cope with a kicked bucked than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
15b390c
|
They sat smoking the dead mans dope until the chopper came
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
0fb70cd
|
CEASE FIRE,' Captain Johansen shouted. 'Cease fire, what's wrong with you guys? Stop wasting the goddamn ammo. CEASE FIRE!' Cease fire,' the lieutenants hollered. Cease fire,' the platoon sergeants hollered. Cease the goddamn fire,' shouted the squad leaders. That,' I told Barney, 'is the chain of command.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
e70ddce
|
I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows... Or it would be fine to confirm the odd beliefs about war: it's horrible, but it's a crucible of men and events and, in the end, it makes more of a man out of you. But, still, none of these notions seems right. Men are killed, dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are afraid and ofte..
|
|
war
vietnam
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
d0c42e9
|
But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, except there's still this sound you can't hear.
|
|
silence
forest
quiet
peace
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
0efefb6
|
You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
|
|
the-things-they-carried
tim-o-brien
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
97c9d88
|
Peace never bragged. If you didn't look for it, it wasn't there.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
7df3894
|
They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
8e10331
|
A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
473241e
|
There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
|
|
war
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
d77d8e8
|
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
aaed60a
|
He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone--riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria--even dancing, she danced alone--and it was the aloneness that filled him with love
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
30effb7
|
He showed me how...See, he says he's going up through Laos, then into Burma, and then some other country, I forget, and then India and Iran and Turkey, and then Greece, and the rest is easy. That's what he said. The rest is easy, he said.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
ecf676b
|
I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
b54ff74
|
He thought about the difference between good times and bad times, and how funny it was that he could not state the difference, only feel it.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
80c0b52
|
The story' Sanders would say "the whole tone, man, you're wrecking it." Tone?' The sound. You need to get a consitent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these disgressions, they just screw up your story's sound. Stick to what happened."
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
7edb736
|
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
0d0a25e
|
Kiowa who saw it happen said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something-Just Boom-then down. Not like in the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle-not like that. Kiowa said. The bastard just flat fuck fell. Boom down. Nothing else.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
804e721
|
Her white skin and those dark brown eyes and the way she always smiled at the world - always, it seemed - as if her face had been designed that way. The smile never went away.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
f493af7
|
It's sad when you learn you're not much of a hero.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
92249d3
|
They were afraid of dying, but they were even more afraid to show it.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
fbd6302
|
All around me the options seemed to be narrowing, as if I were hurtling down a huge black funnel, the whole world squeezing in tight.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
f2aeabf
|
Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.
|
|
life
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
2b119ed
|
Courage is nothing to laugh at, not if it is proper courage and exercised by men who know what they do is proper. Proper courage is wise courage. It's acting wisely, acting wisely when fear would have a man act otherwise. It is the endurance of the soul in spite of fear - wisely.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
372d5a9
|
He hated her. Yes, he did. He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
3f203dd
|
In battle, in a war, a soldier sees only a tiny fragment of what is available to be seen. The soldier is not a photographic machine. He is not a camera. He registers, so to speak, only those few items that he is predisposed to register and not a single thing more. Do you understand this? So I am saying to you that after a battle each soldier will have different stories to tell, vastly different stories, and that when a was is ended it is as..
|
|
war
vietnam
soldiers
|
Tim O'Brien |
|
bedea68
|
Down inside, of course, I wasn't sure, and yet I had to see her one more time. What I needed, I suppose, was some sort of final confirmation, something to carry with me when she was gone.
|
|
|
Tim O'Brien |