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I guess we're really brothers, aren't we? Don't know what that means, except it means that some of the same things we remember.
Tim O'Brien
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What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end...
Tim O'Brien
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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.
Tim O'Brien
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Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.
Tim O'Brien
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'Well, I still don't get it,' she said. 'The way you talk, it sounds calculating or something. Too cold. Planning every tiny detail.' 'And that's bad?' 'No. Not exactly.' 'What then?' She made a shifting motion with her shoulders. 'I don't know, it just seem strange, sort of. How you've figured everything out, all the angles, except what it's for.' 'For us,' he said. 'I love you, Kath.' 'But it feels — I shouldn't say this — it feels manipulating.'... He talked about leading a good life, doing good things for the world. Yet even as he spoke, John realized he was not telling the full truth. Politics was manipulation.
Tim O'Brien
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I would go to the war — I would kill and maybe die — because I was embarrassed not to. That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried.
Tim O'Brien
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To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.
Tim O'Brien
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I remember opening the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasn't thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once — I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn't happen. I was above it.
Tim O'Brien
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It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.
Tim O'Brien
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They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.
Tim O'Brien
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You find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.
Tim O'Brien
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For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies. Is it true? The answer matters. You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding of reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue
Tim O'Brien
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His love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.
Tim O'Brien
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For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, 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.
Tim O'Brien
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You were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing and dying for plain and simple reasons.
Tim O'Brien
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Tim O'Brien
Creative Commons
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)
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