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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0f8f7cc | Has a confrontational ring to it, doesn't it? Like saying, the sky is rubber, or, your foot's a hippopotamus. | Terry Moore | ||
| d50dfef | yesterday's graffiti on a council wall became today's rant on Facebook. | Terry West | ||
| 49bdb56 | Malus: 'You look like a person with doubts.' Zoe: 'I wonder sometimes if any of this is real - or is it just a business, selling hope to people who can't afford it?' Malus: 'Clever people have been asking that question since the iron age, Zoe. The answer remains the same.' Zoe: 'And... ?' Malus: 'Business is good.' (A dialogue regarding the Church between a demon and a human.) | corruption | Terry Moore | |
| bbedf25 | don't want to give the impression that perfectly normal, healthy, thoughtful, and balanced people are not drawn to orchids. I am told they exist. I just didn't have much luck finding them | Eric Hansen | ||
| 0864bea | Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left the country several weeks before an FBI agent arrived at my parents' front door. | social-commentary war | Eric Hansen | |
| e9f92dd | Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in. You know you're about to die. And it's not a movie and you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 1f85f58 | In a way I wanted to stop myself. It was cruel, I knew that, but right and wrong were somewhere else. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 474fcac | Zapped while zipping. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| d9a5d49 | Every dark cloud may well have its silver lining, but I have come to learn that every silver lining has its dark consequences. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 8fd6bed | He felt crazy sometimes. Real depravity. Late at night an electric sizzle came into his blood, a tight pumped-up killing rage, and he couldn't keep it in and he couldn't let it out. He wanted to hurt things. Grab a knife and start cutting and slashing and never stop. All those years. Climbing like a son of a bitch, clawing his way up inch by fucking inch, and then it all came crashing down at once. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 611171c | They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| ed97966 | There it is, they'd say. Over and over--there it is, my friend, there it is --as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance between crazy and almost crazy, knowing without going, there it is, which meant be cool, let it ride, because Oh yeah, man, you can't change what can't be changed, there it is, there it absolutely and positively and fucking well is. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 5c79781 | In the next days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo lighters. Thatched roofs take the flame quickly, and on bad days the hamlets of Pinkville burned, taking our revenge in fire. It was good to walk from Pinkville and to see fire behind Alpha Company. It was good, just as pure hate is good. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 24bd5ac | Twenty years. A lot like yesterday, a lot like never. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 569d1b6 | She'd say amazing things sometimes. "Once you're alive," she'd say, "you can't ever be dead." -- | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 756cd20 | 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. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| f3ea243 | 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. There is the illusion of aliveness. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 1c68249 | Bir seyi tasimak, sirtlamak demekti; Ustegmen Jimmy Cross'un Martha'ya olan askini tepeler ve batakliklar boyunca sirtlamasi gibi. Gecissiz kullanildiginda yurumek anlamina gelirdi, fakat bunun otesinde yukler ima ederdi. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| c355435 | you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 2f17358 | It's a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn't felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you're afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 2344a9b | And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 0c85d09 | Sert bir dil kullanirlardi o korkunc yumusakligi kapsayabilmek icin. Nallandi derlerdi. Goctu, iserken sislendi. Acimasizlik degildi, sahne durusuydu sadece. Oyuncuydular. Biri oldugunde tam olmek gibi degildi, cunku tuhaf bir bicimde senaryo geregiydi ve repliklerini ezbere biliyorlardi sanki, ironi katilmis trajedi. Ve bu yuzden farkli adlar yakistirmayi severlerdi, olum gercegini parcalamak icin. Cesetleri tekmelerlerdi. Bas parmaklari k.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 5c20b2b | 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." (p 38 "Spin")" | Tim O'Brien | ||
| d67af48 | What is love, for God's sake, if not the most distilled obsession? | Tim O'Brien | ||
| befb4c4 | Can a word stop your heart as surely as arsenic? | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 2499db7 | Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move. | mgg the-things-they-carried tim-o-brien vietnam-war | Tim O'Brien | |
| e9f105f | Stories are for joining the past to the future. | stories the-things-they-carried tim-o-brien vietnam-war | Tim O'Brien | |
| b437003 | There should be a law, I thought. If you support a war, if you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you have to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| f6a2af7 | Is there sound, he wondered, without reception? Do you hear the shot that gets you? How big, in fact, was the Big Bang? Do our pathetic earthly squeals fall upon deaf ears? Is silence golden or common stone. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| a5912c3 | The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| d3dbf39 | What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| dff22a7 | What they carried varied by mission. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 93de133 | The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 6191b72 | In June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated. I was twenty-one years old. Young, yes, and politically naive, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. 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 nation.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 002cf87 | 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...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 been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 2c509a9 | many men would rather place themselves at risk than acknowledge distress, either physical or emotional. In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien gives a clear example of the force of men's shame, when he remembers his fellow "grunts" in Vietnam: 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 brought them to the w.. | Terrence Real | ||
| fa32f8b | My sole fond memory from this period is of a rubbery little Appalachian number by the name of June. Acrobatic tongue. Tooth decay. Illiterate in everything but love.) | Tim O'Brien | ||
| f98a32d | If they veered left, it would feel to them as if they were sinking into the earth: the path would narrow as the ground around them rose up to their hips, then shoulders, then heads. The walls would turn from sod to stone, and it would seem as if they were walking inside a crag in a cliff. The sky would be reduced to a thin swath of blue, broken in parts by the branches of the trees that grew above them along the sides of this ancient channe.. | Chris Bohjalian | ||
| d784702 | As a species, we're either very resilient or super callous. I don't know which. | Chris Bohjalian | ||
| 7cf81b1 | sometimes you just have to bury the dead and move on. | Chris Bohjalian | ||
| a8cb8ef | In America, Walt Disney opened an amusement park. And in Florence, someone was savaging the remnants of a Tuscan nobleman's family. | florence tuscan walt-disney | Chris Bohjalian | |
| 7aa94d1 | Now, the separation between depression and suicide is more crevasse than chasm. | Chris Bohjalian | ||
| 2993a53 | We always have choices. Isn't that what Dante teaches us? | Chris Bohjalian | ||
| eda97fc | That might just mean that I had nothing better to do | Chris Bohjalian |