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Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.
Tim O'Brien
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In the attic, a warhead no doubt burns. Everything is combustible. Faith burns. Trust burns. Everything burns to nothing and even nothing burns.... And when there is nothing, there is nothing worth dying for and when there is nothing worth dying for, there is only nothing.
Tim O'Brien
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The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.
Tim O'Brien
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A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of impossibility to it - like running a dead-end maze - no way out - it couldn't come to a happy conclusion and yet I was doing it anyway because it was all I could think of to do.
Tim O'Brien
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When he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.
Tim O'Brien
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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.
Tim O'Brien
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In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.
Tim O'Brien
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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.
Tim O'Brien
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I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.
Tim O'Brien
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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
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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 ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
Tim O'Brien
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They were afraid of dying but even more afraid to show it.
Tim O'Brien
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Any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. the grass, the soil — everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble.
Tim O'Brien
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Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.
Tim O'Brien
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It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.
Tim O'Brien
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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.
Tim O'Brien
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Right then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave.
Tim O'Brien
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Intellect had run up against emotion. My conscience told me to run, yet some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it came to, stupidly, was a sense of shame. Hot, stupid shame. I did not want people to think badly of me.
Tim O'Brien
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At night, when I couldn't sleep, I'd sometimes carry on silent arguments with those people. I'd be screaming at them, telling them how much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a war they didn't understand and didn't want to understand.
Tim O'Brien
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He had an opinion of himself, I think, that was too high for his own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was a low opinion that he kept trying to erase.
Tim O'Brien
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It was the spirit world. Vietnam. Ghosts and graveyards. I arrived in-country a year after John Wade, in 1969, and walked exactly the ground he walked, in and around Pinkville, through the villages of Thuan yen and My Khe and Co Luy. I know what happened that day. I know how it happened. I know why. It was the sunlight. It was the wickedness that soaks into your blood and slowly heats up and begins to boil. Frustration, partly. Rage, partly. The enemy was invisible. They were ghosts.
Tim O'Brien
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With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.
Tim O'Brien
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A fat little kid doing magic in front of a stand-up mirror. 'Hey, kiddo, that's a good one,' his father could've said, but for reasons unknown, reasons mysterious, the words never got spoken. He had wanted to be loved. And to be loved he had practiced deception. He had hidden the bad things. He had tricked up his own life. Only for love. Only to be loved.
Tim O'Brien
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It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.
Tim O'Brien
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The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.
Tim O'Brien
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Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Tim O'Brien
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Born:
October 1, 1946
(age 77)
Bio:
Tim O'Brien is an American novelist who mainly writes about his experiences in the Vietnam War and the impact that the war had on the American soldiers who fought there.
Known for:
The Things They Carried (1990)
Going After Cacciato (1978)
In the Lake of the Woods (1995)
Tomcat in Love (1998)
Most used words:
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war
life
story
truth
wanted
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carried
true
happened
remember
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