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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7a2ce84 | I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 06e0ab3 | Because it's all relative. You're pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs--the whole world gets rearranged--and even though you're pinned down by a war you never felt more at peace. What | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 4469757 | The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she'd lived a life almost entirely indoors. Her memories were indoor memories, fixed by ceilings and plastered white walls. Her whole life had been locked to geometries: suburban rectangles, city squares. First the house she'd grown up in, then dorms and apartments. The open air ha.. | growing-up home house indoors lake life nature rooms sky thought | Tim O'Brien | |
| 28bdc45 | 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. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no re.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| c133476 | Smelost', dumalos' mne, kak nasledstvo, otpushchena nam v ogranichennom razmere, i esli byt' ekonomnym, ne tratit' ee po pustiakam, to na moral'nyi kapital tozhe poidut protsenty i my reshitel'nyi chas vstretim vo vseoruzhii. Udobnaia teoriia. Ona otmakhivaetsia ot melochnoi povsednevnoi khrabrosti, obydennoi trusosti pridaet pristoinuiu okrasku, opravdyvaet proshloe i podslashchaet budushchee. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| e004dc6 | Inoi raz ty sposoben na podvig, idesh' priamo na vrazheskii ogon', a posle, kogda vsia obstanovka vokrug nesravnimo legche, ogromnykh usilii stoit ne zakryvat' glaza. A inogda, kak na tom pole, gran' mezhdu otvagoi i trusost'iu opredeliaetsia nelepost'iu, erundoi. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 926cd79 | Delat' obobshcheniia otnositel'no voiny - vse ravno, chto delat' obobshcheniia otnositel'no mira. Pochti vse pravda. Pochti vse vymysel. Strannost' voiny v tom, chto vy nikogda ne budete zhivy bol'she, chem kogda nakhodilis' odnoi nogoi na tom svete. Vy razlichaete to, chto imeet znachenie. S chistogo lista, kak v pervyi raz, vy liubite lish' luchshee v sebe i v mire, vse, chto mozhet byt' poteriano. V chas nochi vy sidite v svoei iacheike .. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| de28219 | Oh, man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker," Azar said. " You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like Shredded fuckin' Wheat" "Go away," Kiowa said. "I'm just saying the truth. Like oatmeal." -- | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 5044422 | They would repair the leaks in their eyes. | manliness war | Tim O'Brien | |
| 84d58d7 | Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. | manliness war | Tim O'Brien | |
| e8753b7 | and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe. Still, | Tim O'Brien | ||
| c37b8dc | Well right now,' she said, 'I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like... I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| eec1cd9 | 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. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 5e87b7c | They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 57a7a48 | Well, right now," she said, "I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like . . . I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading." | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 3e43aff | He killed me at the Scrabble board, barely concentrating, and on those occasions when speech was necessary he had a way of compressing large thoughts into small, cryptic packets of language. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 1abf863 | They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried. In | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 9e7880b | 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.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 67cc8ae | 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. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 7e5d10f | 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 | Tim O'Brien | ||
| ae2d722 | 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,.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| b2b59d5 | If a story seems moral, do not believe it. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 8763293 | 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. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| f1b90e4 | 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.. | love possibility sleep suicide | Tim O'Brien | |
| 72a4cb1 | The life takes your self-respect. And once that's gone, well, you're lost. | Barbara Haworth-Attard | ||
| 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.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 36b734e | 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. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 7e07e0f | 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. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| a9731ac | 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. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 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 | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 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,.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| a6ef78b | Tim also hired a company to build a website to advertise and to gain donations for Gary as Senator. In a few short hours, with only spending money on the new website, Tim had nearly everyone who had access to the World Wide Web in Illinois wanting to vote for Gary, had everyone really not liking O'Brien, and he absolutely loved destroying a person's reputation that was on the opposite end of the political spectrum from him. | Cliff Ball | ||
| a887caf | 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. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| f08cf78 | Martha'nin akcigerlerinde uyumak, onun kanini solumak ve avutulmak istiyordu. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 0ce54cf | Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 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.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 457d02f | 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.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| fe9e74c | 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.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 3d8f27b | 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. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| a290f46 | 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. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| fc1ae06 | Glavnyi gruz vsegda byl vnutri, to, chto soversheno ili chto predstoialo sovershit'. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| befddba | Whiting, Fred L., Roswell Revisited. 1990, Fund for UFO Research, POB 277, Mt. Rainier, MD 20712 Send SASE for free summary and list of publications. Stringfield, Leonard, Roswell and X-15: UFO Basics, MUFON Journal, #259, Nov. 1989, pp. 3-7. Friedman, S.T., 1991 Update on Crashed Saucers. MUFON Conference Proceedings, July 1991, Chicago, IL. Available from MUFON, 103 Oldtowne Road, Seguin, TX 78155. Send SASE for info. O'Brien, Mike, Sprin.. | Leonard H. Stringfield | ||
| 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. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 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 | Tim O'Brien |