The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.
Tim O'BrienRead
We tend to regard history as true and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' as untrue. That's always puzzled me.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the nature of truth in storytelling, questioning why we often accept historical narratives as factual while dismissing fictional tales.
Tim O'Brien's quote challenges our perception of truth in literature versus history. He points out the paradox in how society often accepts historical accounts as absolute truths, while fictional works like 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' are seen as mere fabrications. This invites us to reconsider what we define as truth and the value of narratives, whether fictional or historically based, in shaping our understanding of the human experience.
Themes
TruthHistoryFictionNarrativeLiterature
In practice
Example use cases
In a book club discussion, this quote can be used to spark conversation about the importance of storytelling in understanding history.
More from Tim O'Brien
All quotes β...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'BrienRead
Unlike Chicago or New York, small-town Minnesota did not allow a man's failings to disappear beneath a veil of numbers. People talked. Secrets did not stay secret.
Tim O'BrienRead
Place is so important to me. The Midwest is like a ghost in my life. It's present as I look out the window now. I see Texas, but if I close my eyes and look out the same window, I'm back in my hometown in Worthington, Minnesota, and I cherish those values and that diction.
Tim O'BrienRead
In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.
Tim O'BrienRead
War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.
Tim O'BrienRead
Similar quotes
Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.
Dan SimmonsRead
A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.
Charles BaxterRead
After I won the Newbery Medal for 'From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,' children all over the world let me know that they liked books that take them to unusual places where they meet unusual people.
E. L. KonigsburgRead
Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.
Virginia WoolfRead
Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
Paul AusterRead
The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.
Mickey SpillaneRead