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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 .. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 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. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 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" | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 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.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 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. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 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.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| f07c16a | Fakat su da dogru; hikayeler bizi kurtarabilir. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 10988fd | Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story. | the-things-they-carried the-things-they-carriedries tim-o-brien vietnam-war | Tim O'Brien | |
| a38f6b5 | What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. | stories the-things-they-carried tim-o-brien vietnam-war | Tim O'Brien | |
| 42b6eb1 | Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up. | mgg the-things-they-carried tim-o-brien vietnam-war | Tim O'Brien | |
| 0b59a54 | His brain had the bends. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 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. < |
Tim O'Brien | ||
| 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. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 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 (<|
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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.. | life suicide | Tim O'Brien | |
| 80a764d | Kogda ty razoblachen, perestaesh' boiat'sia razoblacheniia. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 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 < |
vietnam-war war | Tim O'Brien | |
| 4124708 | when you're dead, you just have to be yourself. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 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. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| f4bcf28 | In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| f317cb0 | His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 5301a93 | the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to .. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 4ef9f8a | people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 9a2fee6 | It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 35128cf | He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around" (p89 "Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong")" | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 30aa02f | That's a true story that never happened. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| f645ab5 | They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it...they died so as not to die of embarrassment...they were too frightened to be cowards." (p 20-21 "TTTC")" | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 7f74c9f | It was the burden of being alive. Awkwardly, the men would reassemble themselves, first in private, then in groups, becoming soldiers again. They would repair the leaks in their eyes. They would check for casualties, call in dustoffs, light cigarettes, try to smile, clear their throats and spit and begin cleaning their weapons. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 2897571 |
To, chto Dzhon Ueid poshel na voinu, bylo zalozheno v prirode liubvi. Ne radi togo on poshel, chtoby grobit' drugikh ili sebia, ne radi togo, chtoby byt' khoroshim grazhdaninom, ili geroem, ili chelovekom nravstvennogo dolga. Tol'ko radi liubvi. Tol'ko chtoby byt' liubimym. On voobrazhal, kak otets, kotorogo uzhe net na svete, govorit emu: <|
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trauma
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Tim O'Brien |
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| b91997c | They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 62376fa | 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 | ||
| e020d18 | The greater a man's fear, the greater his potential courage. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| f82efe0 | It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| d8f45f7 | 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 out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you'd feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn't wate.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| b03d309 | There were red checkers and black checkers. The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larger strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There were rules. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 37a9fbc | 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. And you have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or your lover. A law, I thought. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| c16464f | Thanks also to many writers, including but not limited to Nathaniel Fick, whose book One Bullet Away helped illuminate one Marine lieutenant's thinking; Tim O'Brien for The Things They Carried, which sure cleared up one young man's idea of war as glamorous; Phil Klay for Redeployment, which was a personal revelation for me as both reader and writer; and David Finkel for the reporting and writing in Thank You for Your Service. These last thr.. | Nicholas Petrie | ||
| d682707 | What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. [...]And afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| fe9974a | 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 | ||
| f45e46f | If Stalin could only see us now, with the American Ambassador here, he'd turn in his grave. | Anastas Mikoyan | ||
| d00be96 | Cautiously, | Louis Sachar | ||
| 0165663 | And I can get my own phone," said Leslie, "with unlimited text messaging!" "And I can get my car fixed," I said. "Or maybe even a new car." "Or a new house that already has a swimming pool," said Leslie. "And a hot tub," I said. "And a game room, and a pool table," said Leslie. "And a giant TV with surround sound, and every kind of video game." And, and, and... That's the trouble with money." | Louis Sachar | ||
| 72a8d43 | Mushroom Surprise | Louis Sachar | ||
| 8db641d | My dog, Pugsy, was hit by a car, | Louis Sachar |