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9e7880b
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It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know. Norman Bowker leaned back and considered what he might've said on the subject. He knew shit. It was his specialty. The smell, in particular, but also the numerous varieties of texture and taste. Someday he'd give a lecture on the topic. Put on a suit and tie and stand up in front of the Kiwanis club and tell the fuckers about all the wonderful shit he kn..
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Tim O'Brien |
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67cc8ae
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Courage was not always a matter of yes or no. Sometimes it came in degrees, like the cold; sometimes you were very brave up to a point and then beyond that point you were not so brave.
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Tim O'Brien |
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7e5d10f
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They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At
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Tim O'Brien |
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ae2d722
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When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts,..
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Tim O'Brien |
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b2b59d5
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If a story seems moral, do not believe it.
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Tim O'Brien |
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8763293
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They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.
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Tim O'Brien |
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f1b90e4
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At what point," he asked, "does one decide on rafters and a rope? Answer: no points to be had. There is merely what happened, what is now happening and what will one day happen. Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us. Gravity has a hand. Bear in mind trapdoors. We fall in love, yes? Tumble, in fact. I..
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love
possibility
sleep
suicide
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Tim O'Brien |
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dd53532
|
If you weren't humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders. You'd be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching ou..
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Tim O'Brien |
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36b734e
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Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of that summer didn't happen in some other dimension, a place where your life exists before you've lived it, and where it goes afterward.
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Tim O'Brien |
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7e07e0f
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It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that's all it was. And right then I submitted. I would go to the war--I would kill and maybe die--because I was embarrassed not to.
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Tim O'Brien |
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a9731ac
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A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done.
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Tim O'Brien |
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2476e77
|
You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. 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. To
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Tim O'Brien |
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7a81ace
|
Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel--the spiritual texture--of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are,..
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Tim O'Brien |
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a887caf
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I am forever astonished at the longevity of childhood. How it never ends. How we are what we were. How turtles and engines and stolen kisses leave their jet trail across our gaping lives.
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Tim O'Brien |
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f08cf78
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Martha'nin akcigerlerinde uyumak, onun kanini solumak ve avutulmak istiyordu.
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Tim O'Brien |
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0ce54cf
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Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness.
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Tim O'Brien |
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0e5f7de
|
I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and when, and why? What really happened to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist stooge, or a nationalist savior, or both, or neither? What about the Geneva Accords? What about SEAT..
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Tim O'Brien |
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457d02f
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All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968. Tim O'Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high enough--if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough--I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had..
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Tim O'Brien |
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fe9e74c
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Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can't clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own st..
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Tim O'Brien |
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3d8f27b
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Obshchim byl gruz ikh pamiati. Odni nesli to, na chto ne khvatalo sil u drugikh. Byvalo, nesli drug druga, esli kto-nibud' byl ranen ili vybivalsia iz sil. Perenosili nedomoganiia.
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Tim O'Brien |
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a290f46
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Kazhdyi derzhalsia, kak umel. Inoi prinimal rasseianno-prenebrezhitel'nyi vid, inoi prikryvalsia napusknoi gordost'iu, drugie soldatskoi vypravkoi ili nenuzhnym rveniem. Oni boialis' smerti, eshche bol'she boialis' vykazat' strakh.
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Tim O'Brien |
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fc1ae06
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Glavnyi gruz vsegda byl vnutri, to, chto soversheno ili chto predstoialo sovershit'.
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Tim O'Brien |
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7b43140
|
All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit.
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Tim O'Brien |
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f96acea
|
You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. 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. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty. Listen
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Tim O'Brien |
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009f8e0
|
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you ..
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Tim O'Brien |
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3c0d6b4
|
sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
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Tim O'Brien |
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9b12cb0
|
In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh." True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. For"
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Tim O'Brien |
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b7b9102
|
After that long night in the rain, I'd seemed to grow cold inside, all the illusions gone, all the old ambitions and hopes for myself sucked away into the mud. Over the years, that coldness had never entirely disappeared. There were times in my life when I couldn't feel much, not sadness or pity or passion, and somehow I blamed this place for what I had become, and I blamed it for taking away the person I had once been. For twenty years thi..
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Tim O'Brien |
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c451ff2
|
How do you generalize? War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead. The truths are contradictory.
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Tim O'Brien |
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3fcc604
|
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a fire-fight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil--everything. All around you thing..
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Tim O'Brien |
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f07c16a
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Fakat su da dogru; hikayeler bizi kurtarabilir.
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Tim O'Brien |
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10988fd
|
Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
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the-things-they-carried
the-things-they-carriedries
tim-o-brien
vietnam-war
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Tim O'Brien |
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a38f6b5
|
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
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stories
the-things-they-carried
tim-o-brien
vietnam-war
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Tim O'Brien |
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42b6eb1
|
Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.
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mgg
the-things-they-carried
tim-o-brien
vietnam-war
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Tim O'Brien |
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0b59a54
|
His brain had the bends.
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Tim O'Brien |
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d6d193d
|
My zhivem v nashikh dushakh kak v neizvedannykh stranakh, raschistiv sebe dlia obitaniia lish' po malen'koi ploshchadke; v dushe blizhnego my znaem lish' polosku vdol' nashei s nim granitsy. Edit Uorton. <>
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Tim O'Brien |
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7b98f36
|
Building the Mean Streak was not a mistake. We needed a wooden coaster and we were hoping for a Beast. But it was never on the same planet as the Beast. Nothing has ever come close to the Beast.
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Tim O'Brien |
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adad2b2
|
Esli ty khochesh' pomoch' tvoemu veteranu, izbegai tserkvei, pripisyvaiushchikh zlo potustoronnim silam - naprimer, d'iavolu, soblazniaiushchemu liudei ili vseliaiushchemusia v nikh. Delo, v chastnosti, v tom, chto, predstavliaia sebia zhertvoi vneshnego vozdeistviia (<>), chelovek ne mozhet vyrabotat' zreloi samootsenki, predpolagaiushchei razvitie i obogashchenie ot zhiznennogo opyta. Peishens Meison. <
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life
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Tim O'Brien |
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3c4410e
|
Produmyvaia detali, Ueid neozhidanno proniksia novym, ugriumym sochuvstviem k ottsu. Vot, znachit, kak ono bylo. Khodish', delaesh' svoi dela. Nesesh' etu noshu, zamurovyvaesh' sebia v molchanie, priachesh' adskuiu pravdu ot vsekh ostal'nykh i bol'shuiu chast' vremeni ot sebia tozhe. Nikakoi teatral'nosti. Grebesh' sneg, okolachivaesh'sia v politike ili torguesh' v iuvelirnom magazine; periodicheski ishchesh' zabveniia>>, predaesh' nastoias..
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life
suicide
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Tim O'Brien |
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80a764d
|
Kogda ty razoblachen, perestaesh' boiat'sia razoblacheniia.
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Tim O'Brien |
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ae83c22
|
Oni nesli sobstvennye zhizni. Na nikh chudovishchno davili pogoda i stress. Na poslepoludennoi zhare oni snimali kaski i bronezhilety, shli nalegke, chto bylo opasno, no pomogalo sbrosit' napriazhenie. Chasto na marshe oni ot chego-to izbavlialis'. Udobstva radi, oni vykidyvali sukhie paiki, podryvali granaty i <> -- naplevat', ved' k nochi vertolety privezut eshche, a potom paru dnei spustia eshche i eshche: svezhie arbuzy i iash..
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vietnam-war
war
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Tim O'Brien |
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4124708
|
when you're dead, you just have to be yourself.
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Tim O'Brien |
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84d0116
|
At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.
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Tim O'Brien |
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f4bcf28
|
In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer.
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Tim O'Brien |